It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

Write Your Mother Every Day

11 January, 2019

I’m not great — in fact, notoriously bad — at keeping in touch with people I care about. I leave them with the best of intentions to call regularly to keep in touch, but I allow life to get in the way and before I know it weeks have gone by. I used to think this proved me an uncaring, shallow person, but I’ve learned it’s more that I am easily overwhelmed by the present and, of course, I don’t scale well.

It got so bad that I was letting months go by without calling or writing Mom. What kind of cretin goes months without calling his mother? Well, this kind, I suppose… sigh. I never stopped feeling guilty about it and yet I did nothing.

The solution, of course, is routine. Routine is the antidote to scale. Take anything you care about doing — if you can make it part of a routine, you will do it. If you don’t, you might as well admit you’re not going to do it and deal with the consequences.

It seems a bit wooden to make talking to your mother part of a routine, but I tried it, and it works. I write her an email every morning (just before this blog). She always writes back. I know everything that’s happening in her life and she feels much closer to me. It doesn’t take any effort at all and it’s delightful to be properly connected with one of the most important people in my life.

So, take my word for it — write your mother every day. You’ll be glad you did.

The Wonder And Horror Of Scale

10 January, 2019

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

8 January, 2019

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.