Cops, Brains, Stories, Patterns

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This particular one grew out of a conversation I had over email with our own dear Mojo because our "We Need Better Police" (K)ategory distresses me, rhetorical.

Conclusion: I'm not at all convinced we can *get* better police without better models of municipal government.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Local Police Control

What's tripping us up here is the collision of something that we, as a species, are great at (pattern matching) and something we're terrible at (geographic differentiation of narratives).

Our clever monkey brains' love of finding and grouping patterns is well established – just ask any game designer or marketing brander. If you haven't the foggiest what I'm talking about, this is a tidy little intro, and this is a fantastically persuasive six-minute video on the issue with Simon Singh.

The shortest possible version: Our chattering, clever little brains are the most recent release of a 4.4-million-year hardware/software development project optimized for finding patterns, sorting these patterns, then grouping them within a fascinatingly variable set of schemata. These days we dedicate the bulk of our processing power to cataloguing stories.

We've been working the patterns game for 4.4 million years, but the stories game is really new. We've only had spoken language (and thus the capacity to share stories) for about 100,000 years – an evolutionary blink; if all of hominid history was crammed into one year, then we would have just figured out how to talk, and started to work toward sharing anecdotes, around brunch time on December 31.