The Forest and the Trees

There’s a fire hydrant in the woods where I often ride. It’s red, and has a flag mounted on its top that makes it appear taller than it is. And every time I come around the corner and see it, I think it’s a person standing there. You’d think I would assimilate this fact into permanent memory, given how many times I’ve gone through this process of misrecognition and correction. But no.

Regardless, what that hydrant certainly is not, is a tree. This is a failure of pattern recognition. The human capacity for abstract understanding is underpinned by this faculty for pattern recognition. It’s often part of our greatest successes, and of course, also our most abject failures.

Let’s start here. Trees are made of wood. They are generally leafy, or at least branchy, and when they huddle together in any great number, they are called a forest. Sometimes, when a person is too focused on the details of a situation, and not understanding the bigger picture, they are said to “not see the forest, for the trees.”

This also is a failure of pattern recognition, but in the opposite way to my failure to assimilate the fire hydrant into my concept of the world. In the first instance, I am failing to recognize a recurring pattern, despite its obviousness and persistence. In the second, I am failing to see the larger pattern for too much focus on its details.

There is also a third way to get this wrong.

As we were discussing on The Paceline last week sometimes we look at a collection of details and jump to a conclusion about a pattern. In my case, I look at the vast sea of people riding bikes and I impose a “bike culture” concept on all of them, like seeing a forest where there are only, actually, just a scattering of disparate trees. Sites like TCI trade in the idea that there is a familiar, knowable culture attached to riding bikes, and that we, having steeped ourselves in its ways, are uniquely able to elucidate its finer points and share with you its deeper truths.

I apologize if we have failed to properly do that.

The thing is, I notice that very few cyclists interact out on the road. There’s not much in the way of chit-chat or waving or any of that, part of which is because this is New England and we mind our own business here. Another part, though, is that the different kinds of riders don’t recognize themselves in other kinds of riders. They’re just so many lonely trees, swaying in the same wind, but their roots don’t intertwine. There is no forest here, despite the trees.

Where am I failing in basic pattern recognition?

In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s I let myself get swept into the burgeoning roadie culture, which, like it or not, was inspired by a certain rider’s successes in the Tour de France. It felt then like there were a lot of us, though in retrospect I can see that it mostly swept one kind of person up in its arms, affluent-ish white guys. There were in-group signifiers and arcane rules, and it was fun, though ultimately, I think, too exclusive to be good or helpful to the larger cause of getting more people on bikes. I looked at “cyclists” and drew a conclusion about our commonalities that turned out to be wrong.

And then of course, I write about bikes, and I sell some bikes, and I consult with some bike companies, and most of my job depends on my ability to understand people who ride bikes, uncharitably referred to as “the market,” and then plot strategies that will help bike companies reach those people more effectively.

In this effort, I am guilty of projecting patterns onto chaotic data, of over-generalizing and turning a blind eye to the idiosyncrasies and details that don’t fit my ideas. And we get away with this, because as long as your ideas describe a large enough number of people, they will bear some adequate fruit for your clients.

As an aside, this is also how conspiracy theories work, taking a collection of details and imposing a pattern where none actually exists.

The clarity of patterns is not discreet. Some patterns are stronger and more recognizable than others. I’m not completely wrong about bike riders. I’m just not completely right, and in disregarding the folks that don’t fit my ideas, I’m not getting any righter.

So I’d like to stop treating cycling culture like it was a thing, a definable and discreet thing. Now I see it isn’t and maybe never has been. And is that even a problem? Bike riding and the people who do it might just be a loose collection of subcultures clustered around a pretty common hobby and/or mode of transportation.

All of that is ok. None of that impinges on my ability or motivation to ride bikes. It just slightly modifies the story I’ve been telling myself about bikes and bike culture, and that’s probably good, not to look at it like some monolithic thing, but more as a collection of individual stories, loosely related. You can miss the forest for the trees, but you can also miss the trees for the forest.