An interview by Kathryn Schulz with Alan Dershowitz on being wrong (and the follow up) got me thinking about the hazards of being a professional, or maybe just specializing. I have been working with one other person on an enormous project of my very own which requires me to get my hands dirty in the making process the way I’ve fussed about not being able to do for years now. (Why I haven’t done it until now is another story.) Unfortunately I’ve done so little of the everything I love for so long that my everything work now ranges from crap to adequate. It’s not immediately excellent. That is humiliating, stupid, and really, really exciting. I’ve always romanticized the polymath Victorian naturalists (Well, after age ten when I learned that naturalists were something different than nudists.) who seemed able to take a sprightly but rigorous interest in folklore, neurology, poetry, fossils, theology, Greek, boat building, painting, astronomy, and the language of flowers over a ten course dinner.

I think a new era of generalism is coinciding with the start of whatever this particular revolution will eventually be called. It’s suddenly no longer ridiculous to speculate on things outside one’s métier. (Partially because now there’s the potential to share some of the risk in increasingly organized ways.) It’s still scary and occasionally mortifying, but the responses to these forays are mostly charitable and rarely as hostile as they were ten or twelve years ago. It’s more okay than ever for me not to be a Scientist or a Technologist. It entitles me to ask a lot of questions. It keeps me humble in my inclination to do my homework and listen to other people, and audacious in my demands of what science and technology ought to do be able to do. Seth Roberts in a lovely paper on self-experimentation (pdf) in Medical Hypothesis, details the constraints under which professional scientists have to operate and says of his informal self-experimentation, “I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem.” He talks about how powerful and how underestimated freedom (to explore without professional consequences) and personal motivation are in research and invention. It’s a really good paper. Read it.

Huh. I think I just may have outed myself as both a reader of Medical Hypothesis and a self-tracking nerd. Might as well finish the job. I’ve been tracking a wild array of data for more than ten years now, though most people I’m close to don’t know I keep these sorts of records. Before now, I rarely mentioned it because of the consistent reactions I got on the few occasions I did. Let’s just say they started with raised eyebrows went on to skirt actual diagnoses of hysteria.⁰¹ It’s not culturally acceptable for women to appear too interested in or knowledgeable about their own bodies. Medical, critical, feminist (I’m looking at you, Linda Hirshman), literary, and popular theory are all frothing with critiques of women who appear preoccupied with their bodies. It’s a cliché feminine frailty, a headache on a horny Saturday night, an insanity defense in nineteenth century Ireland. (Probably. That’s a good paper too.) So I have mixed feelings when I survey the present quantified self culture. It’s exciting to see what other people are doing and gives me more ideas than I know what to do with, but I can’t help feeling as though it’s sudden legitimacy has to do with it being a more male culture. Somehow the hordes of women who have been quietly doing this since the beginning of time (especially to prevent or achieve conception) haven’t really found inclusion there. Why?