It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

a blog by hewbrocca

Connect

Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

The Wonder And Horror Of Scale

Last April I became vegetarian, because of the horror of scale. Eating meat at a global scale necessarily implies raising and killing and processing animals at scale, and there is no way to do this that feels either moral or sane to me. There are also carbon emissions consequences, of course. It’s all been thoroughly documented elsewhere.

I am a hypocrite, because I am still eating eggs and dairy and oysters, but that still adds up to a pretty good bit of beef and pork and lamb and venison and fish and chicken not eaten by me. So I guess that’s good.

But is all scale bad? I think not. The Romans came up with a way to make government scale (vast oversimplification, yes, but still valid I think). The resulting period of freedom from chaos brought great learning and improved the lives of many. I’m woefully underschooled in Chinese history but I suspect similar things can be said about China.

Then there is the Internet. Interconnectedness has made us all scale in truly amazing ways — we all I think derive great benefit from the ability to contact each other and find and transfer knowledge instantly. On the other hand it has also brought great pain and threatens to destroy open society because we can’t tell who to trust anymore.

(The above isn’t so much a failing of the Internet itself as much as it is our early failure to recognize the importance of real authentication in a connected world… but I digress.)

What’s important I think is that we start thinking in terms of scale when we do things. Should I change my plastic containers for glass ones? People say it’s a good idea… but is there a paper anywhere on the implications at scale? Probably there is, and I can find it on the Internet… hopefully an authenticated version.

UPDATE: Just ran across this article on farming sustainably. Whether the author is correct or not, the article illustrates the difficulty of making choices that have implications at scale. It is hardly ever obvious what the “right thing” to do is.

Two Things People Say All The Time That Drive Me Nuts

In meetings — and in many other places, too, but particularly in meetings — people often say “Let’s pull together a straw man to see what everyone thinks about <some idea>.”

What they (obviously) don’t know is that they are mixing idioms. What they mean to say instead is “Let’s float a trial balloon” — something you send up in the air to see if it floats and if anyone shoots it down (and also, perhaps, which way the wind is blowing). It is a perfect metaphor for a prototype idea that you want to test out without committing to it.

What is wrong with saying “Let’s make a straw man?” Well, nothing, unless you happen to know that the “Argument to the Straw Man” is a very specific rhetorical device. When you set up a Straw Man, you make a false target that you claim represents your opponent’s argument, and proceed to argue against it. (The term comes from the “straw men” that were used in bayonet practice for infantry — you can imagine what happens to them after a few minutes.) By arguing against a target you falsely claim represents your opponent’s point, and easily defeating it, you give the appearance of having won the argument. If you were instead arguing against your opponent’s real point, you might well lose — but unless those observing the argument are careful, they might not notice your use of the Straw Man tactic.

Think this is an antiquated device? Hardly — it’s used all the time. When a reporter asks Donald Trump why he won’t compromise with Democrats over the government shutdown, and he responds “The Democrats want open borders! Crime will increase massively if they get their way!”, that is a classic argument to the straw man. Donald Trump has misrepresented what “The Democrats” want, so that he can argue against that thing instead of their real point.

You can see that a Straw Man is almost entirely different from a Trial Balloon, and this is why this malapropism drives me so insane.

While I’m ranting, let’s take on “divide and conquer,” which people say when they mean something like “Let’s the two of us split up and attack our enemy from either side.” Unfortunately this means exactly the opposite of what they think. “Divide and conquer” is actually what you do when you try to keep control over a group of people by encouraging them to argue amongst themselves, thus “dividing” them. From the Free Dictionary: “This expression has its origin in the Latin phrase `divide et impera’. It describes one of the tactics which the Romans used to rule their empire.” It’s a very effective tactic, I’m sure, but it’s not at all what the speaker meant in this case.

Things like this shouldn’t drive me so nuts because I’m really not a language snob. I think it’s the fact that the idioms really mean nearly the opposite of what is intended that drives me so nuts. I’ve learned, however, not to try to point the error out when people make it — they think I’m arguing to the straw man.

Task Management

In a flurry of inspired New Year’s activity, I cleaned out 90% of my task backlog yesterday afternoon. This included doing some useful work — making calls, sending emails, scheduling meetings — but mostly consisted of removing things that never should have been there in the first place.

I’ve gotten pretty good about putting my commitments onto the backlog and ensuring that when something goes there it means I will deal with it in a reasonably timely way. (This is not how I have always worked, to be clear.) Yesterday’s exercise shows, though, that I’m still not paying enough attention to filtering and avoiding committing to things in the first place.

I guess I don’t think you can have a rule like “I will never put anything on my task list that I might discard later.” It would be nice to get a little closer to that ideal, though.

The Virtues of a Routine

It took me until almost age 50 to learn that there is enormous power in establishing a routine.

Long story short, I was in some leadership training at Red Hat and as part of that I started writing a journal every morning. Doing anything every morning beyond getting a cup of coffee had not been part of my life until that point. Basically, I had no morning routine beyond get up, have coffee, eventually make my way to work. So I didn’t really expect my journal habit to last too long, either.

But here I am, over two years later, still doing it (I’ve got about 400 pages of journal entries now). Why? I got into a habit of doing it first thing every morning, and the routine stuck.

What was really cool was I found I could stick other things onto that routine too. So, write a note to Mom every morning, study whatever language I’m working on, work out on the erg… once I got in the habit of doing these things every day it was much easier to keep doing them.

If only I had learned this about practicing 40 years ago!