Science Quote by Mary Catherine Bateson

A scientist warning you off “clearly defined goals” sounds like heresy in an age of OKRs and productivity dashboards. That’s why Mary Catherine Bateson’s line lands: it flips the usual virtue of clarity into a liability. “Blinkers” is the tell. It’s not anti-ambition; it’s a field note about perception. The more tightly you frame what counts as success, the more you train yourself to ignore information that doesn’t fit the frame - anomalies, side paths, human needs, the unexpected data that often carries the real story.

Bateson’s context matters. Raised in a family that helped shape modern anthropology and systems thinking (Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson), she wrote about adaptation, learning, and the messy intelligence of real lives. In complex systems - ecosystems, families, institutions, scientific problems - feedback arrives from directions you didn’t plan for. A goal can function like a hypothesis: useful, testable, but dangerous when treated as destiny. If you overcommit to the metric, you start optimizing the metric rather than the reality it’s supposed to represent.

The subtext is a critique of managerial modernity: the belief that life can be made legible through targets. Bateson isn’t arguing for vagueness; she’s arguing for peripheral vision. Define aims, yes, but leave room for revision, for listening, for the kind of opportunistic creativity that science and survival both require. In that sense, “blinkers” is also a moral word: it asks what, or who, your certainty makes you stop seeing.