Poe’s Law — Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to tell the difference between religious Fundamentalism and a parody thereof.
From List of eponymous laws (sorry, there’s no article for the law itself).
Marco and I have been talking a lot about the role of leadership in organizations. We’ve gotten on to a lot of different tangents, but there’s one important point I’d like to make out in the clear.
When I put someone in charge it’s because I want them to use their discretion — I believe they can be successful. I trust their judgment.
I expect that their team members will support them. I don’t expect unquestioning obedience or anything, but I expect everyone to realize that Leader Guy is, in fact, Leader Guy because I thought he was the best person for the job.
I know Marco’s Bro and, in real life, would probably accept most of his decisions. However, I disagree with this way of thinking in a general sense. My response to his statement goes like this:
What if you made a mistake? What if Leader Guy deceived you into thinking he’s more capable than he really is? What if he’s no longer as capable as he once was (personal problems, brain injury, etc)? What if he’s now out of his area of competence (see: the Peter Principle). What if you only rationalized to yourself that he’s trustworthy, when in actual fact you installed him because he’s dating your sister? What if your trust in him stems from his Harvard degree that his father bought for him? What if your boss chose you because he knew you’d choose That Guy, who happens to be his nephew?
Authority is a dangerous thing. When you trust in vested authority over other qualities then you put all of your eggs in the basket of the authority figure; your risk has gone up dramatically. That may turn out OK if the leader happens to be a good decision maker. However, thousands of years of history have shown us that following the leader doesn’t always work out well, and can often be disastrous. I’m sure everyone has been in a situation where they’ve had to accept the authority of someone who, on the face of it, shouldn’t have been given that power (I know that everyone in the U.S. has).
Marco and His Bro have stated that they don’t expect unquestioning obedience in the leader, but that when the leader has made a decision, they expect the rest of the team to go along with it, even if they think it’s wrong. This strengthens my argument against authority while at the same time cuts its legs out from under it. Yes, you want your leader to be taking the arguments of his subordinates into consideration. If, at the end of the day, he rejects them regardless of their validity, then they may as well not have been voiced in the first place. Both Marco and His Bro have said that if they’d heard of dissent escaping from the confines of the team and propagating up to their level, they’d tend to trust the leader and think of the dissenter as a troublemaker. Of course, that may true in a some cases, but this policy definitely puts a chilling effect on dissent that could be beneficial (or even critical).
In one of my instant messaging chats with Marco, the topic of religion (very briefly) came up. Religion is, of course, the ultimate in authority, both in a supernatural and in a real-world sense. Especially in monotheism, a deity has overwhelming power over its followers, who in turn have none over it. That deity, in turn “installs” its own hierarchy of people to act as a local authority on its behalf — at least according to the people in the hierarchy. Since these people supposedly have privileged access to the deity, they are effectively granted authority by the followers. Religion is particularly good at suppressing dissent, through everything from genocide down to making virtues out of trust and belief without evidence.
Evidence and reasoning are the keys to overcoming the risks associated with authority. They are the great equalizers, because Nature doesn’t care one bit about who has granted authority to whom — but with enough evidence and reasoning you can navigate the rules that Nature has put in place and use them to achieve your goals.
It may very well be that the chosen leader makes successful decisions because she applies the best evidence and reasoning to a problem. Ideally, this should be true in every case; you can make the best decision possible in the shortest amount of time when you don’t have to explain and justify it to others. But we all know that this doesn’t happen every time. Even if the leader has the best reasoning skills, she may not have the best evidence, and so her conclusions might be suboptimal.
This is why I reject authority that exists for its own sake. If an authority figure makes a decision, let the decision stand on its own merits, not on the position of the person who makes it. If it’s a good decision (based on the reasoning and on the evidence), then it’s worth supporting. If there’s an better one, let it be the course of action, regardless of who proposed it. If gathering evidence is too costly (and it often is), then it’s OK to go with the assumptions of the most “experienced” person on the team, but be prepared to reject those assumptions when the evidence contradicts it. Personal experience is a valid argument (we rely on it for a great many decisions), but it’s a weak one, and it should be overridden and/or augmented by objective evidence whenever possible.
Authority, at best, illegitimately takes credit for success. At worst, it leads to failure. Be skeptical of it at all times.
In many (most?) organizations, “being a team player” is code for “being nice” &emdash; which, in turn, is often code for “not contradicting anyone.” The problem with this is that it leads to groupthink and mediocre (or often just plain wrong) results.
I think that this Slashdotter has it right: (emphasis added by me)
I’ve worked for years in highly effective teams, and with success. I can tell you what made all the difference: The presence of equals to debate issues with, so that we could talk each other through the problems and emerge from the session with the feeling that we had defined better solutions. Perhaps we are all arrogant nuisances, but as long as we understand and respect each other we keep each other in check, and can function as effective team members.
The “respect among equals” also translates to “respect among people above and below you in the hierarchy” when such hierarchies exist:
You should only be stating agreement when you reach the same conclusions based on the available information. If you don’t think you have enough information to defend a contrary position, it’s better to state that outright rather than agree by default. The lack of agreement, even without the presence of opposition, might be enough to show that the position is potentially unreliable.
Being a helpful member of a team means working to achieve the same goal as the other team members. It does not necessarily mean following the same process.
Update: Fixed the link to Slashdot. Sorry for that.
Paul Graham has posted a great essay on the lies and misdirections we tell to children, the reasons we do it, and the consequences of doing so. There’s one passage I particularly liked:
Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of the stickiest things you can tell them. Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they’re a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake.
This despite the fact that it can be one of the most premeditated lies parents tell. When parents are of different religions, they’ll often agree between themselves that their children will be “raised as Xes.” And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes, despite the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they’d have grown up considering themselves as Ys.
One reason this works so well is the second kind of lie involved. The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by “outsiders” on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren’t an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren’t an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one?
Now, to segue a bit:
This form of lie is not without its uses. You can use it to carry a payload of beneficial beliefs, and they will also become part of the child’s identity. You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious. Then X children will grow up feeling it’s part of their identity to be honest and industrious.
My grandmother has, on a couple of occasions, (jokingly) said to Laura that “she must have some Irish in her” due to her cheerful and outgoing personality. Laura happens to be Latin American and of course has pretty much zero actual Irish ancestry. There are cheerful and outgoing people in all cultures, but we like to assign people to groups and then infer properties about the person based on the properties we’ve observed or assigned to the group. That’s called prejudice, and it’s misleading even when it’s done with positive intentions.
Lastly:
We arrive at adulthood with a kind of truth debt. We were told a lot of lies to get us (and our parents) through our childhood. Some may have been necessary. Some probably weren’t. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies.
There’s never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They’ve forgotten most of them. So if you’re going to clear these lies out of your head, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
Few do. Most people go through life with bits of packing material adhering to their minds and never know it. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid, but it’s worth trying. I’ve found that whenever I’ve been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of other things fell into place.
Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics Blog writes:
Have You Ever Noticed that people who go around saying “I’m a perfectionist” never are, while people who actually are perfectionists never go around saying it?
I have.
Marco has blogged about the recent Freakonomics blog series on the politics of happiness. He’s tied the discussion to biases within the political and social system against certain people (in particular women and black people; he’s viewing it in light of the current U.S. Presidential race).
He asked the blogosphere:
Given this amazing election year, if I look at the race as a “happy religious conservative”, seeing two people with the societal deck stacked against them, one of whom is very possibly the next POTUS, what am I to conclude about how they got there?
If you’re willing to not put much thought into it, you can conclude absolutely anything you like.
If you are willing to put thought into it, you can only conclude that the situation is far to complex to assign it to any handful of factors that can be explained with one-word descriptions. We simply can’t measure these things accurately enough to really have any good idea.
Marco, in turn, responded with the question that prompted this post:
Do you, yourself, have a feeling about any of that? Does finding the situation too-complex-to-assess make you happier? Sadder? Or does it just lead to not really caring about inequity?
Firstly, I’d like to thank Marco for an excellent question.
I can say that my goal is to be indifferent to the complexity itself — it is what it is, and getting an emotional response to it one way or the other doesn’t help things much.
On the other hand, I do have an inherent desire to know *why* things like this occur, so the fact that we can’t here is a bit depressing.
On the third hand, complexity itself can indeed be interesting; the interconnectedness of things means that we’re always being surprised and intrigued. I enjoy it when we find out things that are non-obvious (which is why I like reading Freakonomics blog myself; their whole purpose is to point out socioeconomic novelties).
Now, Marco’s question (and blog post to a larger extent) also asked how inequality makes me feel. My answer to this is that it depends very much on the nature of the inequality.
Some inequalities are caused by forces that I’ll label as “natural”. Effectively, they are ones that we cannot (currently) change. For example, if you are born with a severe mental handicap, then your chances of wealthy (or even independently living comfortably) are slim to non-existent. That stems largely from the fact that you are incapable of creating the sort of economic value that humanity desires and rewards. You could definitely call this “unfair”, but there’s little point in doing so, because you’d be rebuking a universe that doesn’t listen, much less care. Assuming you cannot change these things, there’s no benefit to feeling bad about them; you lose a bit of your happiness without any corresponding increase in the happiness of anyone else.
Another class of inequality is that which is unnecessary and/or changeable: you can call it “unnatural” inequality if you like. For example, if you are a woman or black (or Catholic in the not-so-distant past), your chances of becoming President of the U.S. are reduced (and at one point they too were slim to non-existent). The bias against women and non-whites is largely based on faulty or non-existent reasoning — in particular, assuming the properties of a group also apply to an individual is not valid. This type of inequality means that humanity loses some of its potential, and is definitely something to be upset over. Ideally, we would be upset enough to change the situation so that the bias no longer occurs.
Lastly, there is inequality that is actually desireable. For example, if you have a useful skill (take your pick, there’s lots; medical is the most palatable example), then you can use your advantage to produce more value. You will typically benefit from the value you produce; since we share our value with the less fortunate (to varying degrees), others will benefit as well. Trying to bring equality to these situations is actually counterproductive. If you force the skillful to produce at the same rate as everyone else, then there’s a missed opportunity for more vale. You can try to make the less skilled produce value at the same rate as the most skilled, but most often this is impossible (the top producers are usually at the top due to some combination of factors that can’t be replicated). This kind of equality makes me happy, because I see the benefits that come with it.
So, I don’t not care about inequality. It’s not easy to see which type of inequality is in play at any given time (and it’s usually a combination of the three), and it’s even less easy to know what to do about it. I try my best to do what is appropriate depending on the circumstances. With that philosophy, it’s relatively easy to avoid unhappiness for the bad kinds to gain happiness from the good kinds.
Paul Graham writes about his heroes: people who have significantly influenced his life. One of those people is Robert Morris:
Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he’s never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it’s surprisingly easy. Don’t say anything unless you’re fairly sure of it.
Here’s the insightful bit though:
He’s not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.
You’d think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that everyone would do this. It doesn’t seem like that much extra work to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. And yet practically no one does.
This is a quality I’ve tried to develop recently: don’t just try to get the right answer, try to estimate how correct that answer is, and act accordingly.
In fact, I usually try to go one step further: improve confidence in the answer by testing, verifying, getting second opinions, etc. It ends up being a lot of work, but in many cases it’s well worth the effort — in fact, it’s the only way to achieve success for many complex problems.
“Sometimes you just need to believe in the power of words: cheap, cheap words.”
Indexed is a pretty self-explanatory blog, once you see it.
I like this one in particular, which Jessica Hagy did custom for Freakonomics Blog:
Today I was reading this Slashdot story about this article on tapping geothermal energy for human consumption. Good stuff.
Of course any time there’s discussion about new energy sources, someone always brings up the unforeseen consequences argument. In this case: “wouldn’t we cool the earth’s core if we started using it’s energy, causing catastrophe?” This post says “no”:
I’ve seen too many comments about the “effect this would have on magma under the earth if we cool it this way.” The answer to these questions is that for a long long time, we’d have virtually no effect. The scale of human activity is just to small compared to the mass of the earth -the heat source for this power generation method. Go back to school and look at the graphics that show just how thin of an area the crust occupies on the earth. http://iga.igg.cnr.it/geo/what-is-for%20IGAnew_file/image038.jpg Now imagine for yourself just how thin of an area human activity would impact.
The poster misused “area” instead of “volume”, and he’s talking about energy impact rather than physical space, but this post did get me thinking… how much area do we actually take up? I mean us, personally, not our ecological footprint.
So I did the math:
I call dibs on the top-left corner.
Update:I made a big calculation mistake figuring the amount of area per person, which unfortunately lessens the entertainment value.
