If you have five birds on a wire, and you shoot one, how many are left?
We understand when the phrasing is this explicit that systems can change. Some “smart” kid on the playground told you variants of birds flying away, cats eating sausages, or raindrops converging into larger ones. Unfortunately, we have a tendency not to extrapolate this principle to where it counts.
The alternative to understanding that systems are dynamic is thinking that systems (or problems) exist only on the first order. That is to say, when Trump seems obstinate in G-7 meetings and a picture circulates globally showing that Angela Merkel doesn’t like him, the take away is that Trump is doing poorly and has alienated allies, which seems reasonable and would be bad. The correct way to think about these things starts with humility (neither I nor anyone reading this can predict the future) and then continues with an appreciation for what the implications over the next month, year, decade, or century might be. For speculative example, the image may have signaled to Kim Jung Un that Trump is a different kind of politician, it may signal to European voters that they should increase their military budgets as the US pulls back its unconditional financial support for the defense of Europe, or to American voters that he is making good on promises made in the campaign to be an American leader instead of a world leader. In contrast, for further speculative example, the image might indicate that NATO is collapsing, that Trump is a Russian plant incapable of hiding his treason, or that he’s a smug, narcissistic misogynist that just really enjoyed pissing off Merkel. Depending on your priors, either, both, or neither of these sample sets might seem reasonable to you, but the important thing to take away is that the implications of the photo are not just that Merkel doesn’t like Trump, and if it is not understood in a broader context it is not being properly understood.
I. Public policy
Public policy has a tendency to respond with heavy hands and make problems worse. Taleb calls these people “interventionistas,” which seems appropriate. The particular type of policy I am referring to is the policy that seeks to solve the immediate problem at hand (starving children, advances in the workplace, whatever the narrative for Iraq was) and ignore the full picture of what these policies will entail. In speaking to people who think this way, I often find that they advocate for a world in which people for some reason will behave the way that (according to the advocate) they “should.”
Laws that criminalize vices may or may not be effective in reducing them, but they are very likely to be effective in getting many people entangled with the legal system, which is often worse for the “criminal” hurting themselves as well as their communities, who lose (perhaps flawed) human beings. When policy affects subgroups disparately (by gender or age for example) the resulting society can be so malformed that no matter how bad the original offense was, it’s hard to imagine that anyone has been left better off.
Recognizing that people come from different backgrounds and therefore have faced different challenges can lead to a more just perspective, but it’s hard (read: probably impossible) to do this without further deepening the tie to those different identities, therefore reducing the sense of oneness and community that might otherwise be forming. This in turn leads to otherization, as those groups are specifically identified as the other, and is likely to allow for explicit policy that hopefully helps to solve the identified injustice, but likely impedes on informal interactions where those identities become elephants in the room.
Welfare, as has been argued ad nauseam by others, can reduce the incentive and ability for its recipients to find productive employment, as well as their natural dignity as they are told by society that they are unable to care (financially) for themselves.
None of this is to say that all public policy is bad public policy (I swear that’s not redundant) but it is a call for more thoughtful and prudent responses to perceived problems. There are unknown unknowns and they can be the most important element in complex decision making. Try to stay aware of at least their presence.
In general, if you hear someone argue that X needs to be done because of Y, and there are people you have good reason to believe are bright that understand these arguments and continue to disagree in good faith, I would go with the people that understand 2+ order thinking. Good decisions incorporate all effects, not just the apparent and immediate ones.
II. You
Like many people in my cohort, my life was more or less planned out by a teenager, and it’s improbable that I will make significant variations given the sunk cost of the last half decade. That’s not to say that I’m displeased with my life the way it’s going (cognitive dissonance?) but I do think it’s important to recognize that 17 year old me wasn’t really thinking about what 22 or 32 year old me would want given the path that would be taken. While he should have thought of where my short term future selves would like to be given the path he was choosing, I think he planned based on what he would want given that path. Recognizing that we change as we continue along paths, and beyond that we change in direct response to the specific paths chosen and also by the specific paths skipped, he should have chosen the path that the respective future “me”s given their respective paths would have most liked to be on. While present me doesn’t have an interest in being a doctor or coder or rabbi, the version of me that took those paths might have loved them and have been happy that those paths were chosen. Our preferences are affected by decisions, which are driven by are perceptions of our preferences, proxied by what we like today.
