Berkeley Talks: What is understanding? Berkeley scholars discuss

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

(Music fades out)

AILEEN LIU: Welcome to L&S 1. Today, we’re talking about what is understanding. And I’m joined here by three faculty. And I’d like them to start off by introducing themselves. 

HERNAN GARCIA: All right. I’m Hernan Garcia. I’m an associate professor in molecular and cell biology, and in physics. And I’ve been here since 2015. I work on physical biology, or biophysics, with particular focus on how cells make decisions, and how you go from a single cell to an animal, for example. 

And an undergrad course I teach is MCB 137L, which is a lab course on physical biology. It’s a dry lab course where we do lots of theoretical modeling, lots of simulations, coding. So it’s quite a fun class. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: My name is Christian Paiz. I’m an associate professor in ethnic studies. I’m a historian by training. And so I do work on the 20th century Farm Labor Movement history in California. I teach classes in U.S. history, for the most part. I teach ethnic studies 10AC, which is for the first year students, probably they’ll be taking an American Cultures class. And that class is a history class on race and ethnicity in the U.S. West. And so it kind of covers a big, big range of classes — a big range of years. 

ARIANNE EASON: Hi, I’m Arianne Eason. I’m a faculty member in the psychology department. I am a social, cultural and developmental psychologist. And so what that really means is, I study what exists in our cultural world promotes prejudice and bias, and then how can we systematically make changes to make a more equitable outcome for people of lots of different groups. Inside my class, I teach PSYCH 163, which is the development of prejudice and bias. 

AILEEN LIU: Our question today is, what is understanding? And this word understanding, we were chatting a little bit before this video started, can mean so many different things, not just disciplinary, but also grammatically. And so I wonder if each of you could maybe say a little bit from the point of view of your field, and the kinds of research questions and methods that you have in your practice, what understanding means to you. You could also think about it, what it means in your classrooms. 

ARIANNE EASON: I mean, I guess I think — I guess maybe I’ll go first. 

[LAUGHING] 

So I think understanding is a really big — like, that’s a big question and a big topic that we can approach from a lot of different ways. When I think about it through the lens of being a psychologist, I really think about understanding as a demonstration of say, knowledge that we have about the world. But that knowledge doesn’t necessarily have to be through what we say. It doesn’t necessarily have to be explicit, but it’s really about shaping the way that we engage with the world around us, and with those around us, and being very flexible. 

So I think a lot of times, if we were thinking about the college context, and what is understanding, people’s first reaction might be, I’m able to give an answer. But that’s not really understanding. It’s really about being able to apply it to different contexts that you may not have seen before. And I think kind of wrapped up in that for me is a recognition of what you don’t know. To really understand also means to recognize what you don’t understand and where the limits of your knowledge are. 

AILEEN LIU: Arianne, I’m really curious, in your answer you talked about the demonstration or application of knowledge. And you also talked about how it’s flexible, it can be applied to different situations. And I wondered how that’s connected to prejudice, because prejudice also seems like a way of understanding the world, and maybe can be applied flexibly. Is prejudice flexible or inflexible? 

ARIANNE EASON: I think traditionally, people have thought of prejudice as being a relatively inflexible kind of cognitive bias, maybe an effective bias in the sense that you see someone who’s from a particular social group and you say, this is what they’re like, or you have this immediate feeling and reaction to them. That’s kind of without the broader contextual or idiosyncratic aspects of who that person is. And so in some ways, I think, if I’m being very bold, I would say that prejudice is a lack of understanding of those around us at a really deep level. Yeah. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, I like the two words, like, context. I thought that was very interesting. And it’s just having the tools to be able to assess the context. But also, I like the other aspect that you mentioned, which is also being humble enough to know what you don’t know, and to know that you don’t know what people are thinking, and to be … I mean, I would add also like, the generosity that goes with that, not assuming that you know again, what people are thinking, but trying to yeah, maybe understanding the way I’m seeing your definition is like being able to put yourself in other people’s shoes, and try to be able to empathize. 

ARIANNE EASON: Yeah, yeah, like, perspective-taking. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, something like that. I like that. Yeah, it’s a very interesting. 

ARIANNE EASON: I mean, I think it also manifests outside of our interactions with other people, but also in how we approach research. There are limits to how do we make sense of the world around us? Like, what are the contextual mechanisms that might exist in shaping, I don’t know, whether a cell goes from one cell to a multi-system organism, or even shaping like, how do I know what the answer is to a scientific question that I put out there? 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: I’m really struck. I mean, because both of you are coming out of much more scientifically minded fields, right, I mean, or self-defined as science. And history is quite averse to itself as a scientific field. So when the question was brought up, like, what is understanding, I thought, I don’t know. I don’t understand understanding in some ways. 

[LAUGHING] 

And I thought, oh, God, I’m a professor. Like, what is going on? I don’t know what understanding is. No one’s going to take my classes now. 

But part of it was that historians are so, in many ways, understanding fields layered. It’s like, an ever … so it’s a never-ending process. Oftentimes, there is an attempt to engage whatever argument you’re being presented about the world, in the past, usually. It’s an attempt to identify the complexities, so whatever structure of that argument, right, like, the evidence that they’re providing, the material that they’re providing, and that’s important. 

But history is about humans. And it’s about people, and it’s about the world, and it’s about being alive or not being alive. And it’s about some weighty things like prejudice. It can be about parents, people who are parents, or people who are workers. And that kind of understanding really requires a tremendous insistence on ambiguity, and this comfort that you’re taking care of business to know what you know, and yet, at the same time, this kind of generous, humble attempt to name the world as it appears to be at the moment. 

And with the idea that maybe you’ll grow, right, and maybe you’ll become a little bigger, a Little fuller, a little bit more flexible, more nimble with what seems to be a contradiction of having something stable, like, I know this, in addition to, it’s hard for me to imagine. For instance, in my case, farmworkers who are working for a tiny amount of money, and yet, having to deal with so many other facets of their life. 

So for an 18-year-old usually here, that might be hard to imagine. For some, it might not be, right? But that kind of understanding, I’m not sure how to name it, but it feels kind of like this ambiguity is a word that I keep coming up, yeah. Without going into the world of we don’t know anything, which is sometimes could be an issue. And that that’s to me, a troubling thing to go into. 

HERNAN GARCIA: But in some sense, it is connecting to the sort of empathy that we’re discussing, right, like, given the context. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Yeah, yeah, empathy, and also like, rigor, right? And an insistence and consistent attempt to not lie, to me, to begin with, not lying, right, which is, to me, prejudice. Prejudice is lying. You lie to the world, and you lie to yourself that you don’t see the world, right? 

But as an academic, and as a thinker, and as a citizen, as a person in this world, the idea is that I’m here. And I’ll try to name the world as much as I can. And I’ll try to hear the world as much as I can. And in that process, maybe I’ll understand something. That’s kind of like a dance. It’s almost like an embodied … and we were talking about, it’s not just what you say, it’s how kind of you are maybe after all the things you learn, or don’t learn. Yeah, that’ll get you an A to the students. 

[LAUGHING] 

If you’re sure, then I’ll get you …  just tell the professor, “I’m embodying my understanding, Professor.” 

So that’s interesting. I guess my prejudice was with thinking about history, that there was such a thing as an ultimate understanding, or like, OK, you wrote the book on the subject. And that’s there is such a thing as ultimate. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Yeah. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Understanding. So that’s … 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: For sure. 

HERNAN GARCIA: So even for, like, I don’t know, like, no matter what aspect of history, you’re saying that it’s always being reworked. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Oh, entirely. It’s hard to imagine in many ways the full complexity of a society in any year. 

HERNAN GARCIA: In any year. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: It’s hard for us to imagine the complexity of our society right now. And we’re … 

ARIANNE EASON: We’re in it. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: We’re in it, and we’re studiers of it, all four of us. To do that in another time period is very difficult. And it’s not so much the history is being reworked, is that we are reworking ourselves in how we engage with others. And that changes. 

So I’ll give you an example. So I write on farmworkers in a small little valley where I grew up. My family were farmworkers. And the people who I grew up with were farmworkers. And much of my politics is kind of rooted in labor, and people working and thinking. 

And so I write this very long book, I think, or at least my family thinks it’s very long. They’re like, “We have to read the whole thing?” So I write this long book. And it’s all about what it means to be a body, biology in the world under the clear sun, in the environment, picking fruits of usually, in this case, our fruits and vegetables. And I’m doing this from 2010 to about 2016. That’s when I’m doing my dissertation. 

And I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even mention the environment, or very little. And in many ways, is that my own consciousness was still kind of rooted in the 1990s, like, in many ways, thinking about fighting for freedom, that we’re going to attain a future that’s really promising. And as I started to read more about the changes in climate change, and the role that humans have been playing on the environment in much more detail, that has changed the way that I even think about my work. 

Like, all this time I could have been thinking about the environment too. All this time, I could have been writing about this interplay. And I think historians are — for us, understanding is never an end limit. It’s more of a proposition, right? And it’s an invitation. 

This is how I see. And what do you see? Because we begin from the premise that we can see everything, right? Yeah. And so yeah. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, it’s interesting, I guess I had the prejudice of the facts, but you’re saying it’s about the study of the human condition, and that understanding just keeps evolving. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: And that the facts that you have may not be all the facts. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Exactly. And that, yeah. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, yeah. But how they interface with society itself, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t thought in those terms. Yeah, so that’s interesting just because from the standpoint of my training is in physics, and there might be different gradations of what understanding means, but I think there is an overall agreement more or less, that understanding ultimately, the measure of victory in physics is that of one of predictive understanding of phenomena, meaning, understanding something so well that you can predict with precision the outcome of experiments before you can even do the experiment.

So the outcome of something, or the fact that there’s going to be a black hole before you can see the black hole, the fact that you can predict that a new particle will arise from this massive like particle accelerator experiment before that you, like, it comes on for the math. 

And that to me, is the yeah, it’s definitely the sense of victory that I’m after when I’m thinking about biology. And in biology, understanding tends to be a little bit less well-defined sometimes. And so what I find myself when bridging the two fields, is that I need to emphasize a lot what my definition of victory looks like, so that you put the philosophy apart and you get to work in this is where I’m heading with the sort of experiments and the sort of science that we do. 

ARIANNE EASON: I mean, it definitely feels like our fields are on a spectrum, because I feel like psychology sits somewhere in the middle of history, and physics/biology on this. And it’s really interesting, because it’s been a lot of the conversations of our field, like, is our goal to predict exactly what’s going to happen? And do we think that that prediction is going to hold five years from now, 10 years from now? And what is the role of say, cultural spaces? If we understand the fact that the world is always changing around us, do we actually think that we’ve done a good job at specifying the conditions under which something will occur? 

And the answer is usually no, because I think that’s really the power of culture. We’re steeped in it. It’s the air we breathe. But just like us breathing air, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We don’t even realize it’s there. And so it’s ever shifting, though. 

Like, if I think about the time before COVID, right, I lived through it, I worked through it. But it’s a fundamentally different approach to academia. Like, our academic discipline looked very different before then, in the middle of it, now. And so if you take that same experiment that you ran 10 years ago, when people were in just a different space, would you expect the same outcome? And that’s really one of the bigger questions that our field has been really grappling with. And it has led, I think, in some ways to a crisis in psychology of how do we actually understand the world around us as well as we think we did? 

And it’s broader than just the idea of culture shifting dynamically over time, but also, is the culture that everyone inhabits the same? So is the life of Black people similar to the life of white people, Latinx people, Native people in the United States? And if we only ever, say, run studies that have populations of college students, or populations of predominantly white people from the Western world, are we missing so much of how the world actually works and how we understand the people in it? And so that has been really a, I think, a powerful guiding space of our field of what does it mean to expand our understanding of what it means to be human and engage. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: I do think we’re very much in the spectrum. And it seems that our fields are often shifting in that spectrum position, because history was very … it claimed itself as a science for much of the 20th century. Like, historians of multiple political stripes were attempting to figure out what are the motors of history? What are the things that across time explain change? Like, how do we make sense of the chaos of the past? 

It’s not just all happening at the same time. The argument is that there must be some laws, some time, which is a very ahistorical argument. There must be some ahistorical propositions that explain history in order to predict the future, in order to be able to say, how must we move? There’s always the phrase of those who don’t study history, risk predicting it, or something like. 

ARIANNE EASON: Doomed to repeat it. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: We’re doomed to repeat it. Well, I don’t know. Even if you study history, you might be doomed to repeat it. Like, because there is no predictive power in the past for the future, or at least not enough in order to … not in the ways that maybe perhaps both of your fields might be doing it. 

And history, because history has two major problems. On the one hand, it has very little information about people in the past. Whose documents are safeguarded or made available to scholars usually skew in a variety of ways that usually reflect those in positions of power in those societies, and/or reflect particular events. 

So if you have experiences, or histories of colonialism, a lot of those documents will be destroyed. A lot of the knowledges will be destroyed. And so how you can write this history will be in many ways, a reflection of what is already not there. That’s one first problem. 

The second problem is that there’s just way too much information. There’s just like, too much. Like, think of all the texts that you sent. Think of all the bills that … I am a hoarder. Like, now, I’m like, should I put this out?

[LAUGHING]

I have random receipts that I just keep. And I think it’s because I’m a historian, and it’s like, but you’re going to have to go through all those receipts if you’re going to write my biography like or something.

And so that’s what’s history — you have so many documents, so many sources, so many hours to listen that you have to start picking what you’re going to do, and what you’re not going to do, and what resources. So you have too little and then you have too much. And the contradiction, the contradiction holds because you make creative choices in the narrative arc of what seems rational, what seems understanding. 

And historians went through a crisis in the ’80s and the ’90s about it’s the linguistic underpinnings of history that the languages that we use, the narrative structures that we use, the expectations that we have about how we tell the story are really much more reflective of the humanities than they are of the sciences. And I think historians have kind of have increasingly adopted that. It’s like a bitter pill. But we’re like, OK, we can only say so much. 

HERNAN GARCIA: So you don’t think you can get to some sort of predictive framework about societies? I mean, this is probably for both of you. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Yeah, well, what do you think? 

ARIANNE EASON: I mean, I guess that’s one of the dreams of many psychologists. I think, psychology, similarly, there’s a group that leans towards … they call it physics envy, like, we want to be able to predict everything. Here are the universals of the world. And then you have the other side that would call itself more of a humanistic social science, which really takes into consideration like, sociohistorical, and cultural context. That’s the side I probably sit closest on. 

But psychology is made up of seven different disciplines that kind of really range on the expectation of how much say, something like culture would matter. Although, it matters in all the disciplines, you definitely get more of discussions of culture mattering in something like social and personality psychology, in clinical psychology, perhaps, in developmental psychology, and a little bit less of discussions, although definitely still some people do have those discussions in disciplines like cognition and perception.

Even though we know that culture does matter, even at like a basic level of color perception, right, if you’re in a culture where they label different shades of colors more specifically, or broadly, you actually do perceive the boundaries very differently. So we know that culture matters, but sometimes, it’s a little harder to convince people of that. 

I don’t know if I think the goal of our discipline is to actually fully be predictive of like, in the future, because will we ever have the exact same conditions repeat themselves? And I think that is an open question that I’m not sure we’ll ever have the answer to, because I think expand, like, understanding expands, contracts. You look at it from a different kind of space. 

And something you said earlier really struck me about how we think about knowledge. Like, one thing I’ve thought a lot about, and in my work we talk a lot about is, this concept of omission, or these things that are rendered invisible in our social space. And I think as an experimentalist, it’s really hard to study what doesn’t exist in our world. How do you tap into something that’s not in people’s minds, and then figure out the outcome of what’s not there? 

But when we think about what knowledge is, it’s both about what exists in the world, but also what’s left out. And it’s really important, I think, to capture both of those pieces, because they are a dynamic that really reinforces the status quo and reinforces power structures. And so I feel like that’s where the humanistic kind of social science aspect of the work that I do and really think about comes out. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: This is a great question, like, the predictive power, right, and where are our fields. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, the reason I’m asking it, because like, trying to attack biology from the standpoint of the physical framework, you do get a lot of resistance. There’s this whole view of vitalism in some sense. That’s basically where the idea is that the cell is such a complex thing that it’s impenetrable to the sort of approaches that physics has, right? 

And the whole point of why organic molecules are called organic molecules is because people thought that they could only be made by cells, by living things. And then people showed that you can synthesize urea, for example. That was a big deal. So in the history of our understanding of biology, this idea of vitalism has been moved, like, it gets in some sense, it’s like, well, OK, but the whole cell is … it’s hard to think of a predictive model of it. 

But in principle, there is no fundamental law that tells us that you cannot predict the behavior of a cell. It might be more using more statistical approaches instead of deterministic approaches because they’re embedded in a thermal background where there’s noise. But I think– so that’s what I’m saying there is a little bit of this tension. Though, in my case, I guess, I’m betting my career on the fact that you can actually deploy these sort of predictive understanding in the context of living systems. 

But the other place where I think there could be an intrinsic connection with understanding, especially since you’re saying, OK, before in the past, we don’t have that much data, but now, we have too much data. In biology, and to some degree in physics, there is with all these new machine learning approaches, there is also an opportunity to gain predictive power, though, many times devoid of any understanding. But I don’t know how that sort of thing is also interesting in the context of this type of stuff you guys do. 

AILEEN LIU: Wait, can you say more about that? 

HERNAN GARCIA: Well, like … 

AILEEN LIU: How does that show up in your research, for example? 

HERNAN GARCIA: Well, I mean, the classic example I tell is known in my research, which is like, Google can predict traffic, but it doesn’t understand traffic, right? Like, you can predict outcomes, but … and maybe that’s enough. Like, again, it depends on your own definition of victory, right? But my definition of victory is one of understanding what I predict. 

And also, fundamentally, I mean, there’s something that comes up a lot in my circle of friends is like, I think as scientists, ultimately, we want to be able to tell simple stories. And telling somebody, well, I figured this out because I trained a model with 50 convolutional layers, and 50 million parameters, It doesn’t sound like something I can explain to my grandma. So there’s that tension. But again, maybe also we need to adjust what we mean by understanding. 

AILEEN LIU: So in the example you’re giving, Google can predict traffic patterns, but it has no understanding of it. It sounds like for you, it’s being able to explain. And that’s also what you’re saying about the machine learning, that you can’t really explain. Maybe it’s like a black box. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, yeah, well, it’s like a black box, so people are doing here and in other places, they’re trying to be very smart about how to reverse engineer the black box to get understanding of why things work when you use them in the context of a machine learning model. 

AILEEN LIU: Yes, and that for you is victory. 

HERNAN GARCIA: If I can … again, predictive understanding to me, that’s my own definition of victory. I want to be able to explain it in a simple way, that biological phenomena. Why, again, why does a cell decide to be part of the head or part of the tail based on the DNA sequence, based on the inputs of signals that come from the environment, for example? 

AILEEN LIU: I want to make an observation about the ways that each of you have been talking about understanding and maybe trying to … I don’t want to get too abstract, because we’ve been talking at a level of abstraction, I think. So I’d like to get more grounded, but I do have this observation to make, which is that I think in the ways that some of you’ve been talking about understanding, it’s about, I think about this term embodied understanding. It’s about our understanding, like, my understanding of the world, and coming to a better understanding of something. 

But then some of you also talked about a collective understanding, an understanding that a field understands, or that we understand as humans at this point in our evolution and our society. And so maybe this is a question more for, Arianne, because your research is so much about individual and collective, but I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that interplay of maybe we could think about it more in terms of a field of research, or what we do at a research university in terms of advancing individual and collective understandings. 

ARIANNE EASON: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s such a big and important question. When I really think about our role as individuals in a larger collective, I’m often drawn to this idea that we can’t be a self by ourselves, that you’re always kind of in community and in connection with others. And so your understanding, or your sense of self is fundamentally shaped by those who are around you. 

And so I don’t think it’s an accident probably how we ended up in our life courses, like, sorting into our different fields, right? We saw something about the way that our fields approach the work, and we said, mm, that fits with something about how I see the world. And then as we got in there, we were socialized a bit more into our spaces and said, OK, well, yeah, like, let me delve deeper into the way that my field understands and thinks about these questions. 

And then I think as you get older and deeper, you can say, well, I’m going to push back on the way that my field might engage, and broaden the understandings that we bring in our disciplines and say, well, you know, it would help a little bit for psychologists to think about these extra pieces, or here are things that are missing. I’m going to occupy this space and bring the tools of my trade to this other kind of space that could be useful. So then we’re broadening– by like us as individuals, we end up broadening our theories and how our fields approach things. 

So I’ll give one example. One of my lines of research is looking at the omission of contemporary representations of Native people, and the impacts that that has for promoting inequality and anti-Native bias. And so if you look kind of over our discipline, psychology is one of the disciplines that really, in the world helps us understand what is prejudice, bias, and inequality. 

I think one analysis that we’ve done is showing that there have been more than like 40,000 published papers in peer-reviewed journals on prejudice, bias, stereotyping. So we really are out here saying, this is what it is. Here’s the experience, and all these things. But if you really look into those papers, they’re primarily about Black and white people’s experiences, and less than a half a percent even mentioned Native people. 

So just for context, Native people are about 2% of the U.S. population. And so when we think about that, it’s like, how are we defining what prejudice is, what the experience is if we’re only looking at it through the view of one group’s experiences? It’s not saying that we shouldn’t study those groups. As a Black person, I absolutely think we should study anti-Black bias, all of these things. But how does it render invisible other groups? 

Like, can we assume that the bias manifested towards Black people is the same as the bias manifested toward Latinx people, towards Native people, towards Asian people? And I think if you just take a cursory look at the world around us, you would say the answer is no. There are similarities, but there are also some unique things. 

And so being able to say, OK, like, here are the unique experiences that exist, help us better understand what a theory of bias might be. And so I think about that through the lens of what is individual experience, and what are the role of us as individuals, saying like, this is something that deserves to be studied. This is something that needs to be talked about and understood more formally. And then taking that to the collective and saying, now, I’m putting this out there in the world, I’m making the invisible visible, and kind of charging it for all of us who are in this space to then contend with if I want to make a theory of bias, if I want to have a theory of prejudice, now I have to incorporate this knowledge in there to become more precise, to become more specified in what we mean, and what we actually want to say. I don’t know if that answered your question, but … 

AILEEN LIU: I think so. I mean, I think I was just struck by this idea that we started with, where you were talking about how we enrich, broaden, deepen our personal understanding of X, Y, Z. And Christian, I think you were talking about this as well. And I was just thinking about how that moves then to a larger understanding that can be empirically tested, or where we can see progress in our understanding. I was thinking more about … and on what you were saying about your field’s understanding of understanding, which is that you can achieve an understanding, you can get to a state where the field does have an accepted understanding of this phenomenon, a certain law or principle to use a term that you used earlier, Christian. 

And when I think about that interplay of like, the collective understanding as individual researchers enter into a field, sometimes, coming from these interdisciplinary methods, what you were saying about bringing what you’ve learned from your physics training to a molecular biology field, and then thinking about what you were saying about this field as it’s developed over time has certain omissions in the kinds of participants that it’s had, the kinds of research questions that it’s asked, and how to bring that fuller understanding seems to also come from both that collective and that individual intervention. Just trying to think about some of the threads that we’ve discussed so far. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Well, I just wanted to connect to that, because we talked about the assumptions that one needs to make. We talked about the layered understanding. But also, I think one thing that is sometimes a challenge, at least my field, is, what level of coarse graining are you after? Understanding can be at different, you mentioned it, at different levels. 

But like, a classic example is like, I don’t need to know where all the atoms are to build a bridge, right? I don’t need to know where each molecule is in here, what speed it’s going at in order to be able to make statements about pressure and temperature. So that’s … there is in some sense, saying, well, there are all these things that I’m willing to throw away that I don’t need to account for in my theory. But then I can test whether I was right in throwing those away by seeing how much predictive power I have. 

So I guess the two things that I’m finding, the things that maybe connect in some way though, how you deliver on them, and whether you can actually test that predictive, understand whether it was … you were OK in getting rid of those assumptions or not. It’s harder to test. I guess what I wanted to say on that front is that when I talk about understanding, also, I think there’s a level of nuance in terms of what level of coarse graining you want. And that might also be philosophical to some degree, right? 

Do I need to account for this? Do I need to know what that 1% deviation is or not? And so I’m curious whether that plays a role, and how that plays a role in the type of understanding that you guys seek. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Yeah, that’s a great. There’s so many things, where thinking earlier, the comments on the collective, and now here the layering. So I don’t know, I think about history– I mean, so history has a ton of facts, right? So there’s not like anyone can understand whatever they understand. 

So there’s a ton of facts. And there are things that just don’t make sense once you look at the data that we have available to us. So people don’t get to have their own history, or their own understanding. They get to wrestle with whatever it is that we have. And the understanding is really the wrestling. 

It’s like, you just have to work hard. It’s not about your A paper, it’s about your A semester. It’s about reading books, debating books, figuring out the weaknesses of those books, thinking about the ways that you might be able to bring into not only your own experiences, which are fundamental to learning, but also, your tendencies, and your curiosity, and the surprises, because that 1% deviation suddenly could become the whole basis of a new field. You’re like oh, my God who knew? Like, no one, until this person came in. 

So the role of the individual person, especially the individual undergraduate in the field, is one of just like, bounty, I would hope. Like, the rigor of working hard, but like you’re at a buffet at the same time. And you’re eating everything, right? And you just want to figure out, OK, if I mix this and I mix this, what happens? If I mix this … like, that kind of energy. 

So to me, and that ideally could flow into a really significant, and maybe even potentially profound realization that benefits all of us as we read your work, and as we consider the ways that you are seeing the world, and that we may not have, and that we don’t need to just yet. This is your role, right? Like, we learn from you as teachers. So I’m a historian, but I’m also an oral historian. And so for me, the collective is always principal. 

It’s like, I did about 200 hours of oral histories with people in their 70s and 80s, and there was just nothing I could have learned without those hours. And so for me, it’s like, what I write is really just more of an echo of what people have said. It’s like a massive funnel that kind of allows me to say why I think this is what they’re saying. I think this is how they see it. I think this is what they experience. And let me show you all the infrastructure that allows you to decide whether or not you think I’m right, right? Like, I’ll show you my data, I guess. 

And so for me, so I entered history because I wanted predictive power. I grew up really poor. I grew up really working class families. And I wanted to figure out a way to fight back, right, to equalize people to have food, to have health insurance, to have housing, all of that. And I wanted to know how people fought back in the past, and what were the benefits of that, and what were the predictive powers of that. 

And that is in many ways, I think, a high aspiration for history. How do we make our world more Democratic, more human, even if that’s a complicated word? How do we make ourselves the very thing that we say that we are, which is that we’re civilized, or that we’re evolved, or something like that. 

But I don’t know if history offers that. There’s just so many different variables at play. Any way of that kind of level of understanding would put us outside of history, that it would put us in a present that just never changes, that once we know the rules of movement and the factors, then we will just know what’s going to happen in the future, and we will know what happened in the past. Like, there’s just … it’ll just be a present linearity that just doesn’t seem to — at least in my experience — hasn’t been available to us. 

Everything is historical. Everything is ambiguous. And the question is not so much can we predict the future like the UFW, the United Farm Worker Movement, which is what I work on. They had this big phrase that said, “Si, se puede, Yes, we can. Si, se puede.” And that language has been interpreted as, we will have freedom. We will do this. We will get there, as opposed to simply, yes, we can. 

So the can is different from the will. And that is so history focuses on the can. We study the past so that we know what’s available to us. The will is not available to us, unfortunately, or fortunately. And the historian, the student then engages with the full humanity, the person and the past. And as they get through these layers of understanding, ideally, they’re able to see as much as they can, these people on their terms, and they’re able to see themselves newly in their terms with the terms of a potentially bigger world than just themselves. 

ARIANNE EASON: That’s incredibly powerful. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: That they can? 

ARIANNE EASON: I really love that. And as you were speaking, it also had me in a space of the different layers of understanding, and how do we know which layers to throw out, and which layers we can or should for any given topic. And one of the things that I think really strikes me is, in psychology, I don’t know if we’re necessarily on like, this is the understanding, but when thinking about how to make sense of other peoples’ minds, we recognize that the different ways that people understand the same event has different consequences. 

And I think that through that lens, it’s a recognition of, there’s different people come to different thoughts about the same situation, but those different ways of making sense have consequences that are unique. And when I think about that, for what the goal of going to college is, and the college students, like, I would say that it’s about expanding your toolbox so that you can see the different levels, so that you can take in what are different forms of understanding that people have, so that way, you can interact kind of across a broad group of people, and experiences, and things along those lines. 

But I also caution through the lens of understanding inequity, that if we only focus at one level, then we have this danger of re-instantiating and essentializing people and experiences. And so it’s really important that we take this kind of multifaceted, multiple layered understanding of events, and that you may not have it now, because you’re an 18-year-old, like, or a transfer student, or any of these things, like, you might not have it and that’s OK. But part of coming to this space is saying, what happens if I take classes across different disciplines to get those different layers and those different approaches? What happens when I meet new people to get a sense of where their backgrounds are, how they view the world? And that’s where you really kind come with those layers that are starting to develop. That’s where you come with some of that humility of there are ways of engaging in the world that I don’t know yet, or that I don’t understand, and I can gain that through my experiences here in the classroom and not in the classroom. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: Yeah, this is a great conversation. I already learned so much. 

ARIANNE EASON: I know. I’m like, can I sit-in you guys’ class? 

[LAUGHING] 

AILEEN LIU: Well, I wanted to come back to, as a way of wrapping up today’s conversation, something, Arianne, that you are sort of I think, getting at with your latest comment, but something early in the conversation that you said, where you were sort of remarking on the way that for each of our panelists today, there’s something about the disciplines that they have found themselves in that attracted them to it. I’m thinking now about the cell decision, right? Like, there’s a cluster of things here that seems to be speaking over. Maybe it’s over by the tail over here. 

So I wonder — and Christian, you’ve spoken so beautifully about how you came to the research that you were doing, and how it’s so deeply rooted in, if I may put in my own words, something about the way that history gives us a sense of possibility that there’s not these foreclosed, predetermined outcomes like the predictive power. If you are born into this zip code or this set of circumstances, this is how your life is going to turn out. And I think for history, for you, like, history gives you those stories and frameworks to understand, OK, it doesn’t always have to be this way. Here are these moments in history where a collective changed something. 

And that, I think, for you, is what is so powerful about this discipline and the research that you’ve taken up. And I wanted to give Hernan and Arianne a little bit of time to share a little maybe for our students, like, what do you think drew you to the disciplines and research questions that have animated your work? 

HERNAN GARCIA: Well, I think for me, it’s basically a sense of wonder for the natural world. And yeah, I think the question of, I wonder is the main driver force. And that’s why I’m … though, there is obviously applications in, foreseen and unforeseen applications, in this sort of basic science we do, I’m a big proponent of basic science and just figuring things out for the sake of figuring things out, and for also the self-growth of just knowing more in life. 

I mean, I think something that comes out a lot at home in the sort of conversations, what is a life worth living? And there’s many definitions of that. Some of it is defined by the interpersonal relationships, how we relate to the people around us. But one of them is also that I define myself for myself is about personal growth in the sense of understanding the world better, both from the social aspect, but also, from how does the world work in general. And I think that’s the way I went into the science that I do, because I find this … the math and physics framework of understanding the natural world very appealing. But once again, because of this, the definition of predictive understanding, that makes me feel like satisfied in that pursuit of trying to figure out how things work. 

AILEEN LIU: Making a contribution. 

HERNAN GARCIA: Yeah, I mean, there is an element of making a contribution, but there’s also in some sense, a completely selfish endeavor. It’s just fun. And I don’t know, it’s just fun to figure things out. And I think we do contribute by even passing along that excitement to the students. 

AILEEN LIU: And Arianne, how about for you? 

ARIANNE EASON: I went to college, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was like, oh, my family was totally like, doctor, lawyer, teacher. 

[LAUGHING] 

And I was like, OK, cool, cool. And I definitely, I was not sure. And I ended up working in a psychology lab by complete accident. I was like, I realized, my friends had jobs and they were like, Ari, you too could apply for a job that feels more useful than opening the door for people. And I was like, oh, yes. 

And I had no idea what a lab or a research lab was, but I was like, I can play with children. Like, I can entertain children for time. And I ended up being able to work in a psych lab. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. 

At that same time, there was a class, and it was called Social Psychology of the Oppressed. And I was like, this sounds like exactly what I want to take. And I was like, please. And it was just a space where I felt like I really got to marry my interest in people watching and figuring out people, and why they do what they do, with also kind of understanding and getting a sense of what inequality looked like, and how to advocate for inequality. 

I spent a lot of time like, in the Black Student Alliance. And so it kind of felt like I could blend my outside of academic pursuits with my intellectual curiosity. And I ended up falling in love. 

I did a senior thesis. And my professor was like, I think you would like research. And I was like, whoa.

[LAUGHING]

I was like, people like me don’t do that, sorry. And then I went to grad school. And so I really think that some of it was college as an opportunity to try something that I had no idea what existed before. And it was a space where I would have never said, like, oh, I’d like to be a professor in my life. It was that I like doing a project. And for some reason, I kept showing up to do this project, and to run this study. And I was like, I think if I can do this now and I still like it, and I keep showing up, I’m probably going to keep showing up. And that’s really what happened. 

And it was really a space that I think got to blend so much of my life experience growing up. I started studying intergroup relations and Black-white segregation. I still study that as well. But in part, because I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, but went to a school that was mandated to be 70% ethnic, 30% white. And so it was a great experience as a middle school and high school, but it also, you could still see self-segregation. You could still see a two-school phenomenon break out. 

And it was like, why despite the diversity that we have, did we still sort across group lines? And so I got to think about those questions for so long, and then actually realize that people study them, and can use that knowledge to create better outcomes. And so that was really what drew me to the field. Like, I think psychology has so much potential for impacting the world in positive ways, and this was one of the dimensions that kind of fit with my spirit that I didn’t know about before until college that people did. 

HERNAN GARCIA: I think what you just said also is very relevant in the context of this class in terms of so many of us go into college saying, well, I’m going to do this or that, but you know, how special it is to be in an environment that is where you can actually explore things, and how important it is to engage in the adventure of learning, leveraging all the opportunities there are to just explore what sort of things one could do. Yeah, and I think that’s very important, especially, again, think of Letters & Sciences, like, the breadth and the breadth of opportunities out there. Yeah. 

AILEEN LIU: Christian, I wanted to give you a chance to expand on what you shared earlier in response to this question. 

CHRISTIAN PAIZ: So I didn’t think I was going to be an academic. I mean, I was super nerdy as a kid. But I thought that going back to school and being an academic was kind of removing myself from the good fight, from changing laws, I don’t know, making reforms, contributing in that way. And I think it’s understandable. 

And I think a lot of our students feel that pressure of being here, of reading books, of being nerdy, of being excited, but at the same time, worrying about their parents paying rent, worrying about their parents buying food, and wondering like, what’s the point of me being here if my family is struggling, or if people I love are struggling, or if the world is struggling. You see the world. And I remember once being an undergrad and taking a seminar class, super wonderful class, reading really beautiful literature, and excited, and loving the discussion, and coming home, or leaving the class, and thinking that my mother had made $21 in those three hours because the minimum wage was $7 at that point. 

So that contradiction was really heavy as an undergrad. And it was really heavy when I was really young. So I became a teacher. That was my sense of contributing. I was a high school teacher, a history teacher. And so for the students who are here, I was the AP U.S. history teacher. So I’m guessing many of them might have taken that class, and that kind of [FRUSTRATED SOUND], like. 

And it was there that I realized that I had been wrong, right, that there are many different ways to contribute, because we were doing really wonderful work as teachers, but the environmental engineers were figuring out how to distribute water in the desert were doing really important work, and the folks who are doing housing development. They’re not figuring out where the atoms are, but they know exactly what kind of wood to use. And all of those were contributions, including the contribution of any poets, and musicians, and physicists, psychologists. And for me, that gave me an opportunity to then pursue school, a further school as a way to then tell the story to my home that already existed there, but that was not understood, that was not visible. 

And to me, so I returned a little … so for me, it was undergrad. And then I didn’t think I was going to return. And then it was through my experiences as a teacher and with my high school students that kind of pushed me to go back to school. And that has shaped in many ways the ways that I do history still, and the ways that I think of myself doing history from now on. Yeah, it’s interesting, our pathways, right? 

AILEEN LIU: Well, thank you so much for our conversation today. And thank you for watching. 

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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