We all know about the classic debate about book smarts and street smarts. Allow me to introduce a third contender: island smarts. But first, a quick digression: Ben Taylor has a great episode of his podcast Thinking Basketball where he talks about the tyranny of the quantifiable as it relates to the limitation of using analytics for basketball decision making. Tyranny of the quantifiable is the tendency for people to give preference to measurable factors in any given situation at the expense of perhaps more important, but difficult to quantify factors. With all this data, nuance gets lost and the world becomes black and white. Throw it in the regression model and move on.

As a basketball example, consider Player X. We can track the scoring rate of all players who Player X defends and use that to determine how effective a defender that player is. However, this leaves out all the currently untracked factors that we all know are more important to a team’s success on defense: off ball positioning, help defense and stunting, simple energy and effort (damn I love some Matisse Thybulle), etc.

I think this concept of tyranny of the quantifiable easily translates to to the realm of psychology. So many potential theories get written off, are ignored, or are “debunked” because they are unsubstantiated or cannot currently be proven (shoutout polyvagal theory). Come on. The brain is a dark and spooky thing. We’re not going to be proving anything up there. Bottom line is if it helps you, it’s real.

Okay, back to what we’re all here for, the music. All the seemingly irrelevant setup was just to contextualize me equating reggae artists with famous psychologists. You don’t need that degree, you’ve just got to feel it. As Bob says, “who feels it knows it.” Let me introduce our honorary doctorates: Bunny Wailer, Johnny Osbourne, and Michael Rose.

Bunny Wailer nails Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs on the track “Fig Tree”. Those figs are stuck at level three. They really want that love and belonging from the other figs. Physiological needs: nutrients from that fig tree, check. Safety needs: uhh… again, the fig tree? Check? Is this working so far? Anyway, we’re all just working to be more actualized.

Johnny Osbourne embodies Carl Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive regard with “We Need Love”. If the whole world could be wrapped up in love, what a beautiful feeling. Momma, Poppa, we all need love, me too.

Okay, I admit this one might be a bit of a stretch. Michael Rose (credited as Toney on Black Sounds Uhro’s incredible “Love Crisis” record) as Ivan Pavlov? He’s “Sorry For That Man” who love a girl like you. But that man does exist, and he does love that girl. Maybe he’s not conditioned by a bell, but he’s conditioned by something. Men are dogs, so on and so forth.

Put your books down kids and listen to more reggae.