Exceptionality

Anyone can be an exception to a rule. But when a large number of people all claim to be the same exception to the same rule, they have simply defined a new rule.

I find it interesting which supposed "rules" of society are so broadly unpopular that that the appear to exist for no other reason than to allow people to loudly proclaim that they are an, if not the, exception to said rules.

I suppose it's another way of seeking meaning in life by being better in some way than other people, by presuming that the "average person" blindly, or by virtue of their own mediocrity, falls into some or another undesirable category, when living, breathing examples of such people are nearly impossible to actually find.

Differentiated

It's been some time since I've used a graphic for The Short Form, mainly because, as I've mentioned before, it's hard for machines to read the text in a picture. But I was talking with an acquaintance earlier this week, and this part of our conversation stuck with me.

There is a difference between preventing bad outcomes, and preventing them from happening to oneself.

I suppose that it's an obvious sentiment, but I don't know that it's thought about all that much. In a lot of ways, it's like the difference between using The Club, and installing a Lojack, or other locator system, in a car. The Club is an obvious theft deterrent; it's goal is to not only make it more difficult to take the car, but to be obvious about that fact, so that the would-be thief moves on. But it doesn't really change their incentives; they simply look for a car that doesn't have such a device, and attempt to steal that one.

LoJack, and other locator systems, on the other hand, while being inobvious, carry a much greater risk to the thief if they do, in fact, steal the car... after all, it can be tracked by law enforcement, and that leads to a higher chance of being caught in a stolen car. But the fact that one cannot tell by looking if a car is equipped with a locator means that taking any car in a neighborhood where they're known to be in use carries higher risk. And this is why these systems often carry discounts in insurance premiums, they lower costs of insurers more broadly, and it's worth passing some of that savings on to those to have the systems installed.

This all came up in the context of the supposed generative automation apocalypse that's coming for certain sectors of the knowledge workforce. While a lot of people are offering various advice, from learning how to supervise automated systems to dumping the industry entirely and shifting to skilled trades, the general viewpoint is the same: This is going to happen, here's how you take care of you. It's modeled on The Club... a car is going to be stolen; this is how you ensure that it isn't yours. But maybe a LoJack model, trying to head off the worst of the transition in general, for everyone, would be better for all involved.

Discollected

While I was thinking about the idea of collective action to change the fate of the job market, I noted that the United States is a very individualistic culture. And considering that a bit more deeply, it occurred to me that they may have been what was behind George Will's observation that here in the United States, we don't prevent catastrophes, we clean up after them. And maybe that's because prevention requires genuine collective, cooperative action, while clean-up can be countless individual and small-group efforts, localized to the specific places that people care about.

I think I need to buy some subscriptions to quality news sources. I'm starting to realize how impoverished my thinking can become when I don't have access to good thinkers, even if I may otherwise disagree with them.

Bedrock

It's a simple enough sentiment: "The foundations of trust are reliability and integrity."

But, I would hasten to add, the foundation of reliability and integrity is trust. I first encountered it as a bit of snark, but "he who never wins and never quits is an idiot" is more true than I think many people are willing to give it credit for. Keeping one's word and keeping one's commitments are both predicated on the idea that there will be a payoff in the future.

And I think the problem is that the people who preach things like reliability, integrity and grit are so accustomed to the payoff happening that they don't realize that for many, if not most people in the world, it's not a given. If reliability and integrity are simply avenues to being taken advantage of, people aren't going to display them. Not out of a disdain for virtue, but out of a belief that virtue is an expensive path to receiving nothing in return.

Rationing

I suspect that people are not as much irrationally concerned with technology as they are rationally concerned that they live in a society where their fellow citizens, driven by a sense of their own poverty, will mumble regrets while watching them starve if it means getting something for slightly less than it would have cost them otherwise. Technology is not the threat, it is the tool that actualizes the threat that a perceived need for thrift poses to those whose employability is tied to other people's willingness to make discretionary purchases.

Specialization, brought on by technological advancement, has allowed people to become very good at skills that are required neither for society to function, nor for people to care for themselves. This puts them at risk of losing their livelihoods when other people feel straited. 

Which Problem

The first thing that comes to mind, every time I see yet another online argument that pits "meritocracy" against "diversity" is:

A brilliantly inspired solution to the wrong problem is still solving the wrong problem.

Regardless of whether one believes that the Trump Administration's hostility to "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs is born of a sincere desire for the United States to operate solely on some or another definition of merit, or is little more than a fig leaf covering a mindset that wishes to return to the days of openly discriminatory hiring practices (which wasn't really all that long ago), the argument over it misdirects the spotlight.

In accepting the framing that the number of desirable jobs should be limited when compared to the number of people who want them, the focus moves away from remedying scarcity to managing (and sometimes, it seems, nurturing) it. And there's no way to manage scarcity that will force everyone, especially those who can't get what they need, to concede that the distribution is fair. And because "fairness" is not an objective attribute of anything, it will always be a bone of contention.

There is no value in looking for yet another way to figure out who should be left without a piece of the pie. It's simply a recipe for argument and division. But sometimes, I suspect, that's the point, given that there's no way to win a fight that doesn't happen.

Fortunate

There's nothing wrong with being lucky; "hard work" isn't the only means to worthwhile ends in life.

I'm not normally the sort to wish people luck. Luck, for me, is when external factors come together in ways outside of one's control to create a positive outcome. And while that can be utterly amazing, it is, more or less by definition, unreliable.

That said, there's nothing wrong with being lucky. And so I find the tendency of LinkedIn posts to downplay, or even deny, the role of luck to be curious. Especially, when the only other alternative seems to be "working hard." What happened to things like skill, vision, determination, endurance, intuition and cleverness? I'd rather work smarter than harder any day of the week, and I suspect that when people speak exclusively about how their hard work led to success, they're leaving out all of the factors (including luck) that they used to multiply that effort into the outcomes they attained. Because a lot of people work very hard on a day-to-day basis. There are very many fewer successful people than there are hard workers.

But I get it. Saying "the luckier I was, the more my hard work paid off" or "the trick is to be prepared to make the best of good fortune, if it arrives" can give the impression that success was not earned, but gifted. And the idea that success must be earned feels more "fair." But fair is where pigs go to win prizes (sometimes, with the help of remarkably literate spiders); it's not a governing principle of the Universe.

That said, I still plan to wish people skill, wisdom and knowledge, rather than luck. Because these are things that people can count on; and when they can't, they can always improve them. But if it turns out that the stars have aligned, and dropped something incredible into their laps, I will still celebrate their good fortune with them. (But they're picking up the tab.)

One Drop

The problem isn't that no one raindrop feels responsible for the flood; it's that no one raindrop believes that its absence would have made things better.

I understand the idea that the choices that individual people make aren't particularly important, and that social systems need to change in order for certain segments of the population to experience justice. But I think that this attitude, while well-intentioned, leads people to think that their own contributions to how the world works are too small to be at all important. But what is a system other than the actions of a group of people over time?

Strings

The Left and Right in American politics often don't understand one another. Many Democrats appear to think that demonstrating Donald Trump's deficiencies will help turn the tide of the election, and a friend of mine was making the point that the media was being derelict in their duty by not striving more forcefully to ensure that anyone thinking for Mr. Trump was aware of his flaws. But many of his followers see him as an instrument of the divine, and it doesn't matter if the puppet is broken when people have put their faith in the puppeteer.

The More You Know

I've seen this image many times, and I get it. But there's an implication that somewhere in the blue area is a reason to be unkind to someone.

The rationale for kindness should be more than simple ignorance of the circumstances of someone's life. Because there's no amount of knowledge capable of making unkindness a means of improving the world around us.

Uninformation

Given that people tend to believe that they know more than they do, are incurious about topics they believe (correctly or not) that they understand and are willing to act on what they think they know without validating it first, worrying about disinformation campaigns waged by others starts to look like scapegoating, especially when such campaigns appear to do little other than reinforce beliefs that the targets already hold.

On YouTube, there's an entertaining reading of a letter that one Kent Ashcroft wrote to radio personality Laura Schlessinger (whether it was ever actually sent to, and received by, her is unknown) calling her to task for citing the book of Leviticus to support her idea that homosexuality was a form of biological error, while ignoring other strictures laid out in the same text.

A number of the comments on the video make claims about the letter, and its intent, that are easily checked and found to be false; in fact, a number of people point out the errors over and over again, only for new people to show up and make the same incorrect statements. One can solve for outside actors seeking to spread bogus information and still have a problem with the citizenry simply being gullible when presented with information that confirms their preconceptions.

Untimed

The problem with the idea that the moral failures of people in the past were the result of their negligence in understanding the self-evident moral principles that were present (although often not widely held) in their world is that it presumes that today is the end of moral history; or at least a history with any clarity. Either today's moral viewpoints become the indisputable, universal, and eternal strictures that somehow eluded the whole of humanity before us, despite having been in plain sight, or we somehow have the misfortune of encountering hidden moral truths that won't be uncovered until later generations discover them. Both of these options strike me as unlikely; accordingly, judging yesterday by the moral standards of today seems hold past generations to a standard many deny the present should meet, all in the service of the pretense that 50 years from now, the 2020s won't be found as morally wanting as many people today find the 1970s.

Escalations

Charles Darwin identifies three basic conflicts that made up the Struggle for Survival. They can be summed up as interspecies conflicts, intraspecies conflicts and conflicts versus the environment. I think one of the things that makes the concept of "evil" so compelling is that it elevates conflicts between people, either individuals or populations, from the personal to matters of the life and death of the species as a whole. And when the stakes are suddenly that high, it's easy to conclude that there's no such thing as extremism.

Aside:

For those of you who weren't here when I started The Short Form, it's mainly an antidote to my tendency to be wordy. Sometimes, thinking about what would otherwise be a long post helps me distill it down into a sentence or two, that says what I want to say, perhaps with a bit of context thrown in for added clarity.

Conflicting

An aphorism:

I can understand how comforting the afflicted makes the world a better place. Afflicting the comfortable, however, seems to do the opposite. And I can see it becoming an endless cycle, with people undoing the comforts that others have worked to create in the sincere belief that the wrong people have been relieved of their afflictions. The newly afflicted, for their part, agitate for the restoration of the old order. Perhaps the problem is that afflicting the comfortable feels like justice. But to the person who feels their comforts are justified, it feels like victimization.

Not Like The Others

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with moral (or moralized) distinctions is that they can make it difficult for a person to portray what they are doing as being different from what other people do, without also making the case that is it better.

I've been noodling on this idea recently, because I was considering what is sometimes termed the crab mentality. The metaphor was first laid out me by my father, who was using it to explain what he saw as dysfunction in the broader Black community. I've run into it several times since then, and a recent article I was reading on Aeon about "momfluencers," and other forms of family-based influencers.

The common thread is that whether people are comparing a group to a bucket of crabs or noting how people will make questionable choices to satisfy a craving for online engagement and material resources, the critic rarely includes themselves in the actual group of people being criticized. When my father first told me of the crab mentality, he was one of the crabs attempting to break out of the bucket, and being pulled down by others. When Ms. Sebag-Montefiore notes that people will share their children with the world in order to garner attention for brands and material comfort for themselves, she pointedly exempts herself from all of it: the "sharenting," the quest for validation and money and, most pointedly, the quest for self-esteem via buying the "right" brands.

There isn't anything wrong with this, of course, but the moralistic tone that attaches to metaphors like the crab mentality or noting "I have decided that I don’t need their products, or their inspiration. I don’t need to see how they live their lives to know how I should live mine," carry the whiff of condescension. Simply because they do. If I have a place in a crab mentality, I suspect that it isn't that of the bravely non-conformist crab. (I don't know what role a cranky, curmudgeonly crab might have in it.) And what's shielded me from influencer culture is mostly a faint disdain for youth that's (perhaps ironically) persisted from my own youth. But I'm not sure that I understand how to describe my own life choices as simply being different, because they work for me, rather than better, because I'm somehow a more ethical person.

Punitive

A lot of what appears to be hypocrisy in comparing how the law treats one person as opposed to another is born of the fact that many people understand the law to be a means by which society punishes bad people, rather a means by which it attempts to discourage bad actions. And to the degree that people make determinations of whether another person is good or bad based on factors other than said person's relationship to the particular law at hand, they appear, if not hypocritical, at least incoherent.

Untreated

The widespread mistreatment of people persists because the question of “How does our society end the mistreatment of people?” is kept out of the center of general attention by the question of “How does our society reserve mistreatment for those people who ‘deserve’ it?” The latter may be a workable position in a world in which concepts like fairness and justice can be objectively derived and known via the scientific method. But at present, those concepts are arbitrary and applying them leads just as (if not more) often to anger and resentment as to the resolution of injuries.

(I'm including the text of the image here, because here, it's actually searchable. Do enough work with online accessibility, and eventually, it starts to sink in.)

Sense of Loss

Normally, when I come up with something for "The Short Form," I create it as an image, and share it that way. I don't really know why I started doing that, other than it seemed like a good, or at least interesting, idea at the time.

But the original idea behind "The Short Form" was that sometimes, what started out as a long and involved post (and some of these can be very long and very involved - if only they were as informative) can be boiled down to a sentence or two. Presenting them as large images really just makes them take up space. So today, I'm going to dispense with it, and just go for the simple bit.

It is a measure of how well off we actually are that certain things foregone due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are counted as serious losses, rather than trivialities.

As I've pointed out before, I've become fond of the saying from the older episodes of Doctor Who that "I didn't know when I was well-off," and I am reminded of that often by the way people speak of the things given up due to the pandemic. I don't mean to write these things off as "first-world problems," because for many people, they are legitimate problems. But I wonder if the focus on them blinds people to what life needed to have been like previously, for them to have become problems in the first place.

Advantaged

 

All For One

It's legitimate to say that once an emergency has started, there is no time to worry about building trust. But that, more than anything else, is the reason to worry about building trust when there isn't an emergency going on.

The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic exemplifies this. Because of the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant (which may still be the one that's currently ascendant in the United States) the level of immunity, natural or vaccine-induced, that's needed to impede infections from easily moving to new hosts is pretty high; therefore, interventions designed to slow disease spread (whether pharmaceutical or social) have a high sensitivity to defections. And it's not difficult to find columnists from a number of different backgrounds calling for measures to mandate, if not compel, greater cooperation.

Somewhat harder is finding people willing to comment about the overall lack of trust that drives the defections. It should not be taken as given that people understand that vaccination is safe, effective and low (or no) cost. It's a bit disingenuous to presume that, and from there label people as somehow anti-social for looking out for themselves. In the end, people take care of societies, because they expect that societies will take care of them. If people were willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater good that they themselves would never be able to participate in, the world would look much different than it does.