no sh*t sherlock

 “You see, while I observe,” is Sherlock Holmes’ haughty catchphrase, touted to many a perplexed Dr. John Watson after his signature bizarre deductions present in each story: a haircut suggesting past service in the military, a tattoo design that hints at an overseas voyage. Sherlock Holmes would be a champion of rhetorically accurate verbs. Literally nothing he deduces is straightforward—and the more outrageous the connection, the more his “genius” reputation is solidified to an awestruck Inspector Lestrade and, in the 2008 BBC show, a Dr. Watson that is officially Over It. As a child first encountering his character, I’ve tried multiple times to replicate his method, staring at people’s clothing, their way of walking, their mannerisms—to no avail.

Deborah Tannen’s “There Is No Unmarked Woman” made me revisit this age-old obsession. On the one hand, I agree that society often projects its prejudices onto objective perceptions of people, be they men or women. But, as Sherlock Holmes might protest, when does prejudice veer into simply, deduction? Our brains are wired on instinct to make inferences, to synthesize our past experiences and recognize patterns in the present. Despite their detriment, stereotypes do, unfortunately, exist for a reason. In Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens,” he attributes this instinct of pattern recognition as one of the fundamental instincts that aided in the evolution of the human species: the example he gave was a florist predicting what a customer might order. A well-dressed gentleman walking in might prompt her to prepare a more expensive bouquet, while a paper boy walking in from the street might warrant something simpler. In the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, when Irene Adler meets Sherlock completely naked, he gets confused because so much of what constitutes his deduction—a person’s clothing—is no longer evidence he can draw on. It comes down to the disarmingly simple conclusion that things about you, will say things about you. If Deborah Tannen is asking us, as readers, to reserve all judgement on people from how they present themselves, that is simply contradictory to our instincts, and on a deeper level, the law of cause and effect. Because no matter what, the fact is that people dress and act a certain way for a reason. Later in her piece, Deborah Tannen condemns her early assumptions of the women in her conference. But on the other hand, and the reason so many people might have read through her introduction without raising immediate red flags, are these assumptions unreasonable? Are we to dismiss presumptions entirely simply because they are presumptive?

I do not condone stereotypes, or holding onto prejudice. But I also do not believe the answer is a blanket elimination of labels or a disregard for what they might connotate. Stereotypes and the truth both function on the basis of a concept similar to determinism in physics: in physics, if you know absolutely every detail in a system, you are able to exactly predict what will happen in that system infinitely. The root here is that everything we see has an underlying cause. The problem with stereotypes is that they are, by definition, simplifications of the truth. Our brains are statistic crunchers—probability machines designed to predict reality based on a coordinate system of not just accuracy, but also efficiency. A woman wearing a simple outfit might mean that in they prefer order and streamlined-ness; or they might have spilled coffee over a bolder outfit they might have wanted to wear instead. Our brains do not have the ability nor capacity to account for the billions on trillions of possible explanations for every simple detail we notice. Thus, we can only stick to general trends and educated guesses; but compounded over time, we quickly lose our nuance, and deduction gives way to judgement, fracturing into prejudice.

And while our brains are crunching the numbers, we are simultaneously projecting thousands of signals about ourselves to the rest of the world—it is a two-way street. Unfortunately, and no matter how much I tried to deny it in the past, “to dress to impress” is absolutely a principle that exists in our world of complicated social dynamics. In situations with more and more people, our “simplification” tendency goes into overdrive to compensate for the necessity of speed and efficiency in fast-paced social environments. Being unabashedly true to yourself is a good, sound principle. But it can also be naive and narcissistic—connection is about compromise, and if parties are trying to achieve a shared goal, we cannot always push our own agendas. It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where we sometimes must compromise our choices—such as Brent Staples—to accommodate social perceptions of us, and achieve a goal greater than any one of its parts. It often has undertones of racism, bigotry, or oppression. But, and as is the case when we rebel over different forms of superficial etiquette, it is also the result of social sediment that was formed for a reason.

And we must reflect on that reason. Whether or not our deductions are  based on sound values, and not just pandering to our lesser instincts. A Chinese saying goes that the heart of “a saint” is like a mirror—to see what is truly there, a reflection, without any muddying of the water from yourself, or from the murkiness of the world. A smaller ask than to observe—simply, to clearly see.