Generalizations

Jerry Mander wrote about a situation in his book, In the Absence of the Sacred, about the difference between our scientific methods of hunting deer as a part of wildlife management versus the native Americans’ methods. In our scientific method, after crunching numbers, we’d say that it’s ok only to hunt male deer. But no considerations are made as to which male deer are killed.

Native Americans, on the other hand, would have intimate first hand knowledge of the deer in their periphery and would know not to kill an older male deer that the younger ones depended on, as killing it would result in the others dying as well. 

When I told my friend about this situation, he said that the data collection was sloppy and needed to be improved upon. But how? And wouldn’t that still be more complicated than what the natives were doing?

In another situation, my vice principal at my last school wanted to conduct a research project on two of my sixth grade classes. Having a large subsample, she assumed homogeny between the classes and that the only significant differences would be a result of her different teaching methods that she was testing. 

But I knew the students in each class well and could see right away that her methods did not account for or accommodate the differences between those two classes. 

And it’s dawned on me just now (as obvious as this will sound) that if we know the individuals, we don’t need to make generalizations about everyone else.