Cracks in the Bell Curve

They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank,

Fuel burning fast on an empty tank.

Reckless and wild, the pour through the turns.

Their prowess is potent and secretly stearn.

--Cake, "The Distance"

With the Winter Olympics and all the accompanying Olympics-themed fast food promotions in full swing (Dunkin' Donuts is now offering, for a limited time only, gold, silver, bronze, and thank-for-coming-out flavoured imitation cream cheese spread on their imitation bagels), I've been thinking a bit about our need to rank things. Whether it's athletic accomplishments, beauty, musical talent, cooking ability, intelligence, etc etc etc, we expend a huge amount of time and energy determining who is the best (or worst) in a huge number of categories. Sometimes these rankings are created solely to sell magazines by giving people something to complain about...I myself am guilty of buying Maclean's annual university review issue just so I can bitch about how the rating system is skewed towards Ontario schools. Other people buy every third issue of Cosmo so they can bitch about how Ashley Simpson/Tara Reid/Steve Guttenberg beat out Jean Cretien/The Hindenburg/Kim Cattrall in the Top 10 Best Cowboy Dances/Worst Disasters Caught on Film/Most Awesomest Police Academy Cast Members lists. But I think that a lot of the importance we place on rankings is because they somehow tell us in an objective, detached, emotionless manner exactly where we stand in the world.

To some degree, I guess this is a normal human desire...we want to feel good about ourselves for being somehow "better" than a group of people who are ranked lower at something than us, and we want to know how much harder we need to work to cath up to the people "ahead" of us. Producing rankings for certain things like productivity, body mass index, or grades can motivate us to work harder, improve our health, and study more. However, placing too much importance on rankings can lead to burn-out, eating disorders, and transfering from a real faculty into business school (yes, Sloanies, this means you). This effect gets amplified in populations where people are all very similar and all very competitive, since the criteria for differentiation between levels of awesomeness become tighter and tighter. Just listen to Olympic figure skating commentators and I think you'll agree..."well John, I'm shocked and disgusted with the Rumanian's performance. I mean, her left toe pick was AT LEAST two millimetres too far to the left when she landed that quintuple-reverse-backflip. What does she think this is, Spongebob Squarepants on Ice? I don't see anyone in a jellyfish costume, Ivona!" Ivona comes in 29th overall and has to return to her job in the whale blubber packing plant, while the girl who landed the jump with her toepicks properly aligned gets (is forced to?) meet the president.

While the Olympics are probably the ultimate example of achievement-hair-splitting, the western bank of the Charles is also pretty good at amplifying these effects to ridiculous levels of ridiculousness. When TA's assign grades to their students, the difference between an A and a B often comes down to missing two or three questions over the course of the semester. Sure there are some people that clearly deserve their D's (like the kid that handed in a photocopy of his friend's -handwritten- homework once), but for the most part all of these people know what they're doing and are very good students. Still, undergrads and grad students alike compete fiercly with one another for the limited number of available A's, and put themselves under huge amounts of stress to move up in the rankings.

Now, I've already come to accept the fact that I'm really kickass at being a mediocre grad student. This kind of mindset allows you to stay sane while your colleagues throw themselves off the top of Building 10. But sometimes the urge to rank yourself and compare yourself to the people around you is still pretty strong. The other day I was giving a lecture (since the professor got stuck in California due to some snow scaring all the airplanes away from New England) to a bunch of grad students in nonlinear optics. If you just went "WTF is nonlinear optics", then you pretty much know as much about it as me. So I'm lecturing from his notes, trying to sound like I understand more than 2% of the material, when I get to a page that made zero sense when I went over it before class and somehow made negative sense when I reached it in lecture.

Since the class is half-full of Harvard physics students who really, really, really like math (what a loser school), they of course start to ask me questions. I started to freak out internally...what if they think I don't know what I'm talking about? What if they think that I'm not as smart as them? What if they assign me a rank of C- as a TA? AAAHHHH!!!!!!! I momentarily considered trying to BS my way through that page of notes...but then I remembered that I don't want to throw myself off of Building 10, and leveled with them. "You know what guys...I have no idea what this page is trying to show. It's just a bunch of math, we don't ever use it for anything, and I don't even know why it's in here. So just ignore it and save your questions for stuff that I at least slightly understand."

In my experience, over-emphasizing ratings causes you to lose sight of what's really important in your work or personal life. Doing the best job that you can, being the best person that you can to the people you love, and not throwing yourself off of buildings. Besides, I have insider information that the people doing the ranking usually aren't any better at the task in question than the people being ranked. So don't sweat the numbers, and pray that the professor makes it to lecture on time.

And I hate it
When you fake it.
You can't hide it,
You might as well embrace it.

--Sum 41, "In Too Deep"

PS: for everyone that harassed me about not posting in a long time, this is what you get!!!! SIX PARAGRAPHS!!!