There was a meme going around recently, and it went something like this.
I know I tend towards the center, but it's not that there's anything inherently great about being in the middle... and if you've got actual principles, where you fall may change as circumstances change.
It's just...
Imagine you're trying to figure out what an elephant looks like, and all you've got is the testimony of those proverbial blind men.
You don't actually know what an elephant looks like, and their testimony is strange and conflicting. But if you have some sense of who was located where (i.e. the person describing the trunk stood here, and the person describing tusks stood there, etc.) then if you assume they're all telling you what their true experience is, you might be able to build a model of something approaching a real elephant.
You'd probably have to know how to interpret their testimony, get some sense of scale, and it's probably never going to be 100% accurate, but it's something.
There are people out there who will lie, it's true. Will manipulate the situation for whatever reason. Maybe you know that blind man C always exaggerates, so you visualize something slightly smaller for the ears. And blind man D tends to be more conservative, so maybe the legs are actually bigger... whatever.
You really need some idea of what an elephant looks like, and this is all you've got to go on.
Political organizations may or may not be sincere in the arguments they make, but the masses who are persuaded by said arguments generally are. My more conservative aunts and uncles, for example, tend to value personal responsibility more... and they've got a point. I think they sometimes slide a bit too much into punitive measures in order to hold people accountable, Jesus had the whole parable about the Prodigal Son for a reason, and nobody should be permanently harmed by their bad decisions or they've got no room/incentive to do better, but in a weird way people learn to take responsibility when we hold them accountable, and reminding people that they have choices and can control their own lives is sometimes a good thing.
Which is why all too often any advice I have has to be situation specific, and what I'd consider a good answer in one situation may be completely inappropriate for another (like my previous comment about capitalism. In many situations it's a good thing, but not all.)
I've talked before about underlying vulnerabilities, about why Russian influence campaigns gained traction, and this kind of gets at that.
But. It's... complicated. All too often we're all yelling 'fix it!', with no real idea which solutions are really going to fix a problem and which aren't. So we say we need X, or Y, and they may or may not be the answer, but the underlying problem is genuine and it won't go away until someone comes up with a genuine fix. (And maybe some solutions will never be fixed, but we can't really know that until we've given it our best effort. Too many of the people who make it to the top have learned to dismiss complaints out of hand... as 'sour grapes', or from people who are just not as capable, and it gives them reasons to justify an unfair status quo as 'just the way it is', which I don't think we've proven is the case just yet.)
I try to listen for the underlying arguments that resonate, that show the underlying conflict... and it's not generally the buzzwords flying around. It's things like 'do we really have to cut off all the lower limbs of trees so kids don't get injured trying to climb trees? Or are we taking away an essential part of childhood in a futile attempt to make it safe?'
Is it the responsibility of the employer to keep their people from making stupid and injurious decisions, when they create the work environment and pressure their people to constantly do more, and faster? Or should we expect people to be smart enough not to try and climb an unsafe ladder?' (I lean more towards holding the business accountable, in that if the business doesn't provide any safe ladders and is pressuring their people to 'get it done', they clearly have shaped an unsafe environment... but even that is situation specific, and if two people decide to horse around on their fork trucks in clear violation of workplace guidelines I don't think that's on the business. (Videos on fork truck accidents can give you a sense of the potential damage, though I can't find the specific video I was thinking of. Two idiots were spinning their trucks around and, iirc, managed to tip the truck over completely.)
There are people out there who are bad actors, definitely. And maybe they are able to use their resources to spread ideas that are just plain wrong.
But then... why is the idea that big pharma would raise costs on needed medicine in order to rake in huge profits so believable?
And would companies like wal-mart be able to pay their people so little if their employees didn't have welfare and food stamps to help make a living? Or, in the absence of such government support, would too many people realize it's impossible to make a living and find an alternative, thus forcing the business to pay more in order to get enough employees? (As someone once put it, food stamps to employed people are like subsidies to the businesses that hired them. I'd never thought about it that way before, but when you put it like that... it's not entirely wrong, is it?)
That's assuming they could find an alternative, and what's that say about market forces anyway? That you're forced to accept less than a living wage because you're desperate and have to take what you can get? Isn't that a bit like demanding $100 from someone dying of thirst before giving them a bottle of water?
This post isn't meant to delve into that at the level such statements require, actually. It's just giving a sense of the different ways of looking at things. Our different perspectives, where we're all blind men and women, trying to draw a picture of some crazy thing we don't really understand.
And to explain, just a bit, what I try to do when I'm grappling with some wicked problem. Knowing the way we think, knowing our tendency towards biases of one sort or another, I try to use my best judgement to see where every. single. person's. experiences help define the model.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
You step forward.
S/he steps back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
I know I tend towards the center, but it's not that there's anything inherently great about being in the middle... and if you've got actual principles, where you fall may change as circumstances change.
It's just...
Imagine you're trying to figure out what an elephant looks like, and all you've got is the testimony of those proverbial blind men.
You don't actually know what an elephant looks like, and their testimony is strange and conflicting. But if you have some sense of who was located where (i.e. the person describing the trunk stood here, and the person describing tusks stood there, etc.) then if you assume they're all telling you what their true experience is, you might be able to build a model of something approaching a real elephant.
You'd probably have to know how to interpret their testimony, get some sense of scale, and it's probably never going to be 100% accurate, but it's something.
There are people out there who will lie, it's true. Will manipulate the situation for whatever reason. Maybe you know that blind man C always exaggerates, so you visualize something slightly smaller for the ears. And blind man D tends to be more conservative, so maybe the legs are actually bigger... whatever.
You really need some idea of what an elephant looks like, and this is all you've got to go on.
Political organizations may or may not be sincere in the arguments they make, but the masses who are persuaded by said arguments generally are. My more conservative aunts and uncles, for example, tend to value personal responsibility more... and they've got a point. I think they sometimes slide a bit too much into punitive measures in order to hold people accountable, Jesus had the whole parable about the Prodigal Son for a reason, and nobody should be permanently harmed by their bad decisions or they've got no room/incentive to do better, but in a weird way people learn to take responsibility when we hold them accountable, and reminding people that they have choices and can control their own lives is sometimes a good thing.
Which is why all too often any advice I have has to be situation specific, and what I'd consider a good answer in one situation may be completely inappropriate for another (like my previous comment about capitalism. In many situations it's a good thing, but not all.)
I've talked before about underlying vulnerabilities, about why Russian influence campaigns gained traction, and this kind of gets at that.
But. It's... complicated. All too often we're all yelling 'fix it!', with no real idea which solutions are really going to fix a problem and which aren't. So we say we need X, or Y, and they may or may not be the answer, but the underlying problem is genuine and it won't go away until someone comes up with a genuine fix. (And maybe some solutions will never be fixed, but we can't really know that until we've given it our best effort. Too many of the people who make it to the top have learned to dismiss complaints out of hand... as 'sour grapes', or from people who are just not as capable, and it gives them reasons to justify an unfair status quo as 'just the way it is', which I don't think we've proven is the case just yet.)
I try to listen for the underlying arguments that resonate, that show the underlying conflict... and it's not generally the buzzwords flying around. It's things like 'do we really have to cut off all the lower limbs of trees so kids don't get injured trying to climb trees? Or are we taking away an essential part of childhood in a futile attempt to make it safe?'
Is it the responsibility of the employer to keep their people from making stupid and injurious decisions, when they create the work environment and pressure their people to constantly do more, and faster? Or should we expect people to be smart enough not to try and climb an unsafe ladder?' (I lean more towards holding the business accountable, in that if the business doesn't provide any safe ladders and is pressuring their people to 'get it done', they clearly have shaped an unsafe environment... but even that is situation specific, and if two people decide to horse around on their fork trucks in clear violation of workplace guidelines I don't think that's on the business. (Videos on fork truck accidents can give you a sense of the potential damage, though I can't find the specific video I was thinking of. Two idiots were spinning their trucks around and, iirc, managed to tip the truck over completely.)
There are people out there who are bad actors, definitely. And maybe they are able to use their resources to spread ideas that are just plain wrong.
But then... why is the idea that big pharma would raise costs on needed medicine in order to rake in huge profits so believable?
And would companies like wal-mart be able to pay their people so little if their employees didn't have welfare and food stamps to help make a living? Or, in the absence of such government support, would too many people realize it's impossible to make a living and find an alternative, thus forcing the business to pay more in order to get enough employees? (As someone once put it, food stamps to employed people are like subsidies to the businesses that hired them. I'd never thought about it that way before, but when you put it like that... it's not entirely wrong, is it?)
That's assuming they could find an alternative, and what's that say about market forces anyway? That you're forced to accept less than a living wage because you're desperate and have to take what you can get? Isn't that a bit like demanding $100 from someone dying of thirst before giving them a bottle of water?
This post isn't meant to delve into that at the level such statements require, actually. It's just giving a sense of the different ways of looking at things. Our different perspectives, where we're all blind men and women, trying to draw a picture of some crazy thing we don't really understand.
And to explain, just a bit, what I try to do when I'm grappling with some wicked problem. Knowing the way we think, knowing our tendency towards biases of one sort or another, I try to use my best judgement to see where every. single. person's. experiences help define the model.
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