Top 5 Reasons Ranked Lists are Dumb

McBane here, proving to you today of the value of the old proverb, “always shit where you eat.” (That’s how it goes, right?)

5) Everything Does Not Benefit From Our Opinion

A lot of ranked lists in the world (probably most of them) focus on something with some sort of cultural basis. (Pretty much everything is culture, after all.) The thing is, though: the real value of any type of culture lies specifically in what each of us gets out of it. (The “subjective” experience.) So I don’t understand how some people seriously think they can be totally objective about culture. Why rank everything? I think the post-modernists got it right: to some extent, everything is an inkblot test. Culture is not really about artists; it never has been. It’s always been about cultural consumers. Cultural producers exist for us. We don’t exist for them. All we do when we give our opinion, essentially, is decide whether we have an immediate positive or negative reaction to cultural inputs and then justify our beliefs accordingly (not the other way around). So this idea that we can truly be more “objective” than “subjective” about culture is a tad self-righteous.

Consider an example: I recently clicked on a YouTube link to My Chemical Romance’s “Teenagers,” which (of this writing) has had about 54 million (!) viewers after being up for about a year.

Obviously, this level of interest means this song has had some sort of cultural relevance. Yet, what this song means to me clearly depends on my worldview. Personally, I’ve always felt listening to it is a reasonably pleasant experience because it’s a song with angst-murder-advocating emo lyrics (which I generally disdain) plastered on top of southern stomp rock (which I fucking love). (I enjoy attempts at musical cross-pollination, for reasons I won’t get into. I also think that if you didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics, you could have honestly considered using this song to open for Chuck Berry back in the day.) Plus I tend to have a slight interest in the mechanics of emo, because it’s a music genre that no one really gave a damn about just a decade ago when I was in high school (I vow not to become like old people that refuse to believe rap has intrinsic relevance only because they hate it).

But what if I had been a kid growing up in a school with a bunch of overbearingly attention-grabbing emo kids? What if I had grown up on a ranch and still listened to country on the A.M. radio? What about the same thing, except with surfer music in Hawaii? What if I was a disgruntled rock critic who’s heard every type of song under the sun (twice)? What if I was the brother of a teenaged junkie who had shot up his school and then himself?

These are all possible things that could have happened to me that would have been beyond my control. I would still be “me” in every physical sense of the word, but obviously I’d feel very differently about the song; so differently, in fact, that I’m not entirely sure what I’d make of it in each situation. Yet in each case my opinion would be completely justifiable.

So if I don’t even know how I’d feel, how am I going to understand how complete strangers feel about it? Yet I’m supposed to believe that a ranked list has any sort of legitimacy whatsoever except to the person who wrote it?

Yet we’re a culture that ranks everything. We have all kinds of awards for art, for crying out loud: Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, etc. Rankings are pervasive. We can’t get away from them. Do people ask you: “what do you think about X?” Is your response generally: “I liked X” or “X sucks?” I’m betting it is. No one ever says “well I don’t really have an opinion but I found X interesting, and here’s why.” No one WANTS you to say it, either. They just want to know if you liked it.

To a certain extent this is understandable. We generally don’t want to be thought of as saying things are good if certain people we value consider them terrible, and vice versa. This is, for better or worse, a large function of culture: it helps us to stay connected to the people we want to be connected with. Yet this also causes us to want to quantify culture as opposed to experiencing it, which is too bad. Experiencing it is where the impact lies. The “subjective” part is the part we enjoy. It’s “life.” It’s what makes us human. The “objective” part is just our robot brain at work.

So, I think the most useful things ranked lists can be to us are to be a) thought-provoking and b) funny. They can bring up something we’ve never thought about, yet also be amusing, to point out the absurdity of ranked lists as an ends to itself. That’s all I’m trying to do here. Why else would I do lists of things that are obviously static, like Top 5 Numbers? (More importantly, what kind of a douchebag would go out of his way to offer a rebuttal?)

4) History is Bunk

Context is pretty much everything. Yet when we rank things historically, context is often lost because we are trying to be “objective.”

A great example of this is Richard Nixon. Presidential historians are generally torn over whether to put him in the Top 5 or Bottom 5. But I think over time, he’ll be remembered more fondly by history, and here’s why: all the things that made him so hated are hard to judge “objectively.” (This is why Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary of Nixon is so important, and why gonzo journalism has so much value.)

It’s like my buddy El Torcho and I were talking about the other day: imagine, if you will, that the Iraq War had a draft system, and that tons more people were dying than they are now. Imagine if desegregation had been pushed back until just a couple of years ago and that it was only now starting to take place. Then imagine that, say, none of Bill Clinton’s infidelities had been mentioned in the media, and that he had been assassinated while in office. Imagine that Barack Obama had just been assassinated too.

Then imagine that Richard Nixon is your president.

This is kind of what happened 35 years ago, only worse by a factor of nine. The Kennedys were dead. King was dead. Selma was still a fresh idea. This country was as deeply fractured as it had been since the Civil War. Nixon may have had some successful long-term foreign policies, but are those successes purely how we should judge the man? I’m not sure they should be.

But I don’t think history’s going to care about those parts. I’m not saying history has no value; saying it’s bunk is most probably too strong a word. And after all, history’s all we’ve got for understanding the past. But history’s certainly not perfect, and it would be intellectually dishonest to think it is.

3) Most Things are Average

American existence nowadays is legitimately alienating. We don’t grow up in tribes, or villages; we just have families (and even then we don’t generally like them). What we do grow up with, as Americans, is the idea that we’re all gonna be somebody. The sad reality is that most of us ain’t shit our entire lives. Even then, the few of us that reach whatever we aspire to be, what does it really matter? We might get a footnote or two in history, but we’re going to be too dead to care anyway.

Most of us, even if we understand this intellectually, don’t know what to do to make things better; as a result, we can’t untether our subconscious from this drive to be more. As a result, we spend a good part of our days trying to manage existential dilemmas. And it’s tough; we’re possibly the first generation in American history that, on average, won’t be as successful as those who came before us. Superpowers do come and go, after all, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult for us to swallow; we Americans are used to the idea of success.

How do we handle this destiny of disconnection and underachievement? Many of us wrap ourselves in cocoons of irony, and emotionally hold ourselves at arm’s length from others. In our culture irony is, after all, a defense against fear: the fear that, at the end of the day, we just don’t matter, and that nothing is really gonna make us happy. (Oh yeah, and we’re eventually all going to die, too.) We don’t want to believe that our expensive educations and our childhoods in the suburbs were generally a complete waste of time. This need for irony tends to be more striking for those of us who had early success in life; it binded us to expectations, to the affirmations of teachers and parents who constantly told us that we would be someone special.

The end result is something Thoreau understood a long time ago. We are a mass of people leading lives of quiet desperation. Yet when things don’t fall into place, few try to challenge this: no, the majority ends up settling for getting jobs through familiar people. The majority prefers not to get romantically involved with people who are challenging (Rob Fleming excepted). The majority prefer not to pursue, full-bore, any inner dreams.

There’s a more striking reason, though, why the majority doesn’t try to start up businesses, or try to punch above weight in relationships, or try to put it in fifth gear in pursuit of happiness. The fear of rejection has nothing to do with it: nothing is more overrated. “It’s just luck sometimes, breaking into this industry.” “You’re just not really my type.” “Your ideas just really aren’t a fit for what we need.” These don’t hurt us.

What hurts us more than anything, what we can’t live with, is this:

“You’re not good enough.”

Absolute, total failure is soul-pulverizing. At the end of it, what’s left? There’s no reason for us to continue life as a human punching bag, and there are no bets we’ve hedged in the back of our minds that we might hope to cash in one day. We’re just, simply, inferior…and we can no longer even deny it to ourselves.

And we start to break down.

Consider marriage: sociologists (John Gottman, most famously) have done research that has revealed that the most powerful emotional marriage-wrecker is contempt. Nothing comes close. If one partner has contempt for another, the marriage is not only doomed, but the partner on the shit end will often have their immune system affected. That’s stunning. Not even deceit or betrayal can match that.

Failure is a problem. But there’s also another problem, perhaps equally concerning. This one is this: we’ve been taught that all we should care about is validation and achievement…but even that’s fleeting. Ephemeral, at best. It’s certainly no long-term blueprint for being happy; it may get us through the day sometimes, but it’s also probably why so many people who achieve their dreams and have nothing left simply flame out.

So if we’re just playing out the string in the desperate group, or trying to keep ourselves going in the failure or flameout group, we need something else to focus on. And that something is this: how we think about things that don’t have anything to do with us. We can’t accept that most things are just average and not especially relevant to our existence (as painfully logical as this may seem) because so many of us need things not to be average. We need things we can deconstruct. We need an opinion on everything. We need to feel like we understand things others don’t…because the frightening truth, when you peel it all back, is this: what else is there?

2) Everything is Connected, and There’s A Lot More of It

If you know anything about anything, you know Michael Crichton’s book Jurassic Park wasn’t about dinosaurs. It was about math. Math is funny; it has a way of explaining things that we can’t deny unless we’re willfully stupid, like my blog colleague Raptor. (Hey Raptor, measurements of temperatures on the planet gathered by different independent sources all indicate the same thing: it is warmer now than it used to be. Hence, the globe is warming. This is referred to colloquially as “global warming.” Q.E.D. Even your favorite superhero, President George W. Bush, acknowledges global warming exists. There is simply no logical argument to be made against it. Now causation is different, and we can certainly discuss that. But I digress.)

I bring up Jurassic Park because it’s the one thing pretty much everyone has read that deals with large systems theory. (Or “chaos” theory.) Large systems theory reveals a lot of interesting things to us, but the one I’m most concerned with today is this: the uselessness of “objective” rankings due to interconnectivity.

Let’s go back a few years. Let’s say there are 10 tribes on the planet. Say these 10 tribes have 100 people each, and these 100 people have 1,000 different possible ways of interacting with one another. Obviously, the effects that each individual can have on another are somewhat limiting; additionally, each tribe is going to be socially insular, to the point where shared rankings can be useful.

Consider, alternatively, what we have today. Cultural insulation is non-existent (except for the Amish, I guess); additionally, largely everyone our culture has the capacity to connect with each other through a tremendous amount of mechanisms. Telecommunications, the internet, globalization and all the things that accompany them mean that everybody is vastly connected through this mammoth, byzantine web; yet is also means at the same time no one can approach things from the same viewpoint.

Consider how we consume news, for example: back in the day, everyone got their news from their friendly neighborhood shaman. Then came the local newspaper. Then came Walter Cronkite. Now: you can watch network news on one of five (or so) networks. You can watch cable news on one of 500 cable stations. You can read a newspaper. You can read Newsweek. You can surf Google News and cherry-pick the articles you want to read. You can read or watch things that do not operate under journalistic news principles but pretend to give off an air of “newsiness,” like The Drudge Report (for morons who can read) or Fox News (for morons who can’t). You can read dumb guys on blogs. You have many, many options.

We’re all more connected to the news before, but we all have different understandings of the news; furthermore, there’s so much of it that no one can consume it all, much less speak with authority on all aspects of it. So what the hell good is a ranking of top news organizations that pretends to be completely objective?

If you feel otherwise, I have bad news for you, my friend: you’ll probably get eaten by a dinosaur.

1) We Are All Full of Shit

This blog (for me at least) is pretty much all tongue-in-cheek. It’s (sometimes) fun, and it’s good writing practice. But the truth is, I think that I deeply, truly only have about five or six opinions in my life where I am deeply a Man of Conviction (and I’m not going to ever going to address them here, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m being facetious). My viewpoint on a lot of these blog posts is obviously no more informed than anyone else’s, and I think I’ve illustrated already the absurdity of having an opinion on everything; that’s why I like to rank things that obviously have no business being ranked (again, the Top 5 Numbers example). Again, rankings can be funny and thought-provoking, but I caution anyone against taking them seriously.

A big reason for this is because we are all pretty much full of shit. Some people think that since I only have a handful of clearly held beliefs it makes me immoral, or mean, or whatnot. Frankly, I am honestly baffled by the idea that people can have more. We are CONSTANTLY contradicting ourselves, people.

I guess it’s a good thing you don’t think about this, because He Who Hesitates is Lost, but then again it’s also a bad thing you don’t think about this, because you should Look Before You Leap. This is for example very important in dating, because we all know that Opposites Attract. Of course, if you get dumped for the second time in a month by a smack-loving girl with nipple rings, you obviously should have dated a cokehead like yourself because Birds of a Feather Flock Together. The best thing to do to get over it is to drive over to the Starbucks where she works and blow it up while you listen to music on your iPod, which is okay because we all know that Corporations are Evil, unless of course The Evil Corporation is Cool Like Apple. Now if you cut someone else off in traffic on your way there don’t worry about it because You Have To Be Somewhere Important, but if someone else cuts you off be sure and give them the finger because They Are An Asshole. If on your way there you have to run into another heroin-happy lass be sure to stop and chat her up because The Third Time’s the Charm, but also be sure to lock your heart in a box because of course Bad Things Come in Threes. Now before you actually get to the Starbucks I should point out in no way am I pretending to advocate violence because doing so is A Slippery Slope, but then again slippery slope arguments are all absurd because we all know the logical fallacy that says If You Give A Mouse a Cookie, He Will Point a Gun at You and Demand Federal Health Insurance.

There’s a litany of psychological terms that explain all these flaws in thinking (Empirically Unsolvable Beliefs, Fundamental Attribution Errors, Being a Gigantic Douchebag, etc.), but essentially, they all come down to this; unlike now, it was once evolutionarily adaptive for us to make quick, low-info judgments about the world we live in. Why? Because if you didn’t always look out for number one, you would run into existential dilemmas that would kill you, like You Would Not Be Able to Justify to Yourself Murdering Your Buddy Glarg for His Food, and flat-out immediate problems, like The Cave Monster is Going to Eat You Now. Those problems are obviously not what confront us in these times, but our brains are still designed for them.

Instead, we face a world that is more complex than ever, with more to know about than ever, in ways that are quite possibly more unsuited for us to be able to explain than ever. Consequences are often unpredictable. Causation is often unknowable. Yet we still have the same brain, but are somehow convinced that We Know Everything and Can Objectively Put it All Together in a Ranking.

I remain unconvinced.