Category Archives: Ethics

The anti-bias bias

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

It is a certain kind of person who is preoccupied with cognitive bias.

It is a kind of person who seems to have a taste for explicit, formal procedures. It is a kind of person who seems to operate via verbal self-instruction. It is a kind of person who always asks for very detailed clarifications on how things ought to be done, and needs every contingency to be planned out. It is the kind of person who shows up to a new job expecting documentation on how everything ought to be done. This kind of person’s eyes light up when “cognitive bias” is mentioned. (Or “motivated reasoning” or “implicit bias” or “institutional racism”, etc. They are all variations on false consciousness claims. They are always pointed outward at objects of critique, and never back at the ideological subject making them.)

To such people, safeguards against bias are no burden, or maybe even a support. It seems that if formalized anti-bias practices were not available, they would seek some other formalized practice. The question for them is whether the explicit practice we adopt and use has anti-bias features or not.

But some people have a very different relationship to practice. They rely more on intuition, and only occasionally verbally work some problem or another out. Much of what they know is tacit know-how, and muck of their understanding comes to be known only response to concrete situations. If, before engaging a problem, you ask them what they plan to do, they struggle to verbalize it, because, unlike the self-instructors, they don’t code their actions in words before executing them. If you ask them after the fact why they did one action rather than another, they will have to ask themselves the same question.

Yet, these intuitive practitioners are often highly effective at their craft and in solving problems, especially novel problems. Further, they are often pioneers in their fields, and in fact were behind the codification of the very practices executed by the self-instructors.

An intuitive practitioner, after successfully solving a problem, reflects on what they were doing, and tries to explicate principles that intuitively guided them. They move back and forth between practical intuitive interaction with their materials and theoretical formulations of the practice. They tack back and forth between explication of implicit purpose in their own practice, and seeing how well those explications work in guiding practice. Gradually, praxis develops.

But the best practitioners still act intuitively in the moment. If asked why they do what they do, they’ll provide an explanation that conforms closely to their intuitive responses, but this account should not be confused with the explanations given by the verbal self-instructors, which is exposing the code they run when executing an action.

But verbal self-instructor do have one huge advantage over intuitive practitioners. If intuitive practitioners are loaded with self-instructing code and told to execute that code, they lose all grace. They become awkward robots, even more artificial than the self-instructors.

In a world where all people are required to verbalize everything, where intuition and tacit know-how are denied the status of knowing, where one is only regarded as an expert when they can list their source-code on demand, where people are given instructions to execute and templates to format their output, the verbal self-instructors reign supreme.

This is, I believe, why verbal self-instructor’s instinctively love the requirement to neutralize bias. It is why they love bureaucratic rigor. It is why they want everything proceduralized. They can adopt these anti-bias and standardized practices without any impediment, but it encumbers intuitive and reflective practitioners and destroys their ability to — let’s just say it outright — to compete against them.

It tilts the playing field against intuitive and reflective practitioners, so the self-instructors can flourish and dominate.

In the past, I’ve complained about anti-bias meta-bias — the bias in what we regard as biased, versus the biases we neglect to notice at all, versus the biases we regard as virtuous, that is our ethical convictions. But there is also a deeper and worse bias prevalent among the verbal and intuitively-challenged — a procedural, rather than substantive bias — to see intuitive judgment, action and unsupervised perception as inherently more vulnerable to bias than formally codified policies and processes. So the starkest prejudices at all, both substantive and procedural, are coded into institutions, to counter what appear to be biases to the highly-biased minds who implement, support and champion them.

Metaethics

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

When contemplating moral action, we seek ethical principles. We do this almost by cognitive reflex. We ask: “By what principle is this action justified?” We expect to find an answer. Is this because we believe that the essence of morality is rules — rules we must follow in order to be good?

In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig situates rational ethics within a broader nonrational context, which he calls metaethics. Metaethics still obligates us to act, but not on the basis of something we can codify. We act on the basis of relationship, on intuition of the living reality of another person.

It is tempting for anyone from a Christian conditioning (which emphatically includes progressivists) to assume the metaethical ground of ethics must necessarily be merciful. But doesn’t this just establish another rule to obey — a rule to abolish enforcement of rules? A rule of unconditional kindness, of self-sacrifice for the good of the other, of imitation of the crucified redeemer — of automatic altruism?

My Jewish instincts are inclined to view that as an evasion of moral responsibility. Face to face with being who transcends our own, we are addressed and called to respond with one’s own extra-logical conscience. Hineini.

Perhaps Kabbalists are right, that the balance tilts toward Chesed (mercy and love) and away from Gevurah (severity and law). As a holdover from my old math-mystic days, I like to imagine the balance at approximately 61.8% Chesed to 38.2% Gevurah. This tilt implies that we should err toward mercy or charity, while still exercising our judgment as fully and faithfully as we can. But unless I am deeply mistaken, Kabbalists understand the necessity of Gevurah’s discipline, and that the desire to annihilate Gevurah and leave Chesed entirely unrestrained is a form of evil-enabling evil.

I am urgently interested to see if Rosenzweig develops his concept of metaethics in a direction that holds each person metaethically responsible for his own choice and application of ethical systems.

Of course, but maybe

Ethics, Politics

“I’m against violence…” “I do not condone murder…” “Killing is unacceptable…”

…But maybe…

“…he started a much-needed public conversation.” “…he expressed an anger we all share.” “…he has put sociopath executives on notice.”

In other words, he did a bad thing, but maybe he also did some good.

How much good?

So much good that maybe we won’t regret the murder? So much good that maybe the murder was justified? So much good that maybe the murderer was, in fact, a hero?

And how bad was the murder, really?

Is it really so bad to murder an alleged murderer? How many death did this man cause? Is the world a worse place with one less sociopathic zillionaire?

I met a group of friends for dinner last night. The question of Brian Thompson’s murder came up.

I listened to everyone washed their hands with “of course…” before bloodying them with “but maybe…”

I protested the but-maybes. I insisted that we decouple the condemnation of murder from the obvious need for healthcare reform.

It was assumed that my protest was a protest against murder, and, being both tired and outnumbered, I lacked the clarity at that moment to respond.

Driving home I realized that my problem is not with murder or with violence.

If Brian Thompson had been charged, tried and found guilty of 40,000 deaths and sent to the electric chair, I would not have the reaction I’m having. I’d be saying something like “of course we should never celebrate an execution, but maybe….” And the same will go for whatever punishment Brian Thompson’s murderer receives.

My problem is that one man — an elite among elites, posturing as a victimized marginal figure — extralegally appointed himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. And my even bigger problem is that a great many fellow-elites, who share his outlook, vaguely approve of his vigilanteism, because he is dispensing justice as they see it.

The outlook goes like this: “This system is hopelessly corrupt. The powerful are beyond the reach of justice. Maybe we are past the point of getting justice any other way.”…

…”So maybe… it would be a good thing if CEOs feared for their lives when they do ?harmful things to the public.”

A few points:

1) This is literally advocating terrorism. Terrorism is use fear as a political instrument.

2) What the public perceives as harmful is very easily manipulated through propaganda. The public has believed a great many incorrect things, even in the recent past.

3) Half of this country — albeit a less elite and privileged half — holds completely different theories of corruption. They believe that woke radicals dominate our institutions, including education, media, finance and technology, and that the system is hopelessly rigged to give woke radicals more and more power to do horrible things like persecuting white people, destroying religion and public decency and transing all the kids, and so on. The conspiracy theorist fringe of the right believes even wilder stuff. There’s this universal principle of morality known as the Golden Rule. How do we feel about them sitting around a table saying “Of course, thou shalt not kill, but maybe…”

The problem as I see it is that we have all become so goddamn sure that we are so goddamn smart and well-informed and well-intentioned and self-aware that while of course I believe in liberal democracy, maybe… just maybe, the country would be better off if people like me had dictatorial power.

That is my problem.

Our liberal-democratic institutions are designed to make indulgence in our false omniscience impossible. When they work correctly, they force us to take one another seriously as persons. We must win public support for our preferred leaders and their policies through persuasion. We must win customers by offering them better value. We must make our case before a jury of our peers.

These experiences sometimes show us the limits of our omniscience. We come away less omniscient, but much wiser.

That wisdom advises reforming our institutions when they stop working correctly. It advises against giving up on institutions and going radical, illiberal and antidemocratic. This is especially true when we convince ourselves that only antidemocratic illiberal action can save “our” liberal democracy.

I had a friend who was a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. I found his worldview horrifying. The horror had less to do with the falseness of the beliefs than it did the pragmatic consequences of those beliefs: if he truly believed what he professed, he was obligated to respond violently.

My QAnon theorist had no evil intentions. He had no selfish ambitions. He just wanted to protect us from others with evil intentions.

When leftists talk about conservatives, are they really that much different? They have fancier resumes, more reputable authorities underwriting their convictions and more respectable coercive tools backing their wills, but the logic is the same. Conservatives don’t really mean what they say. They are trying to trick you. If you listen to their arguments and find some of them persuasive, you are a sucker. They are motivated solely by greed, but we are motivated only by the public good. Which is why we must fight the greedy, lying people with ruthlessness. We must fight them with every economic and social tool at our disposal. Maybe violence, if it comes down to it.

We learn more about a person by listening to what they have to say about their enemies than from what they say about themselves.

Moral benchmarking

Ethics, Philosophy

Before I dig all the way down into Bernstein’s Radical Evil, I want to benchmark my current views on what is evil, vs immoral, vs unethical.

Evil means active desire to annihilate and inflict suffering on other people.

Immoral means supporting evil, while stopping short of being evil oneself. One accepts, affirms and strengthens the conditions of evil and beliefs of evil-doers, while lacking evil desires.

According to this view, most progressivists are immoral. Only some among them — the ones who support Hamas, chant their slogans and mean it, or the ones who enjoy harming, abusing, terrorizing and humiliating living manifestations of identities they hate — are actively evil to any real degree.

But most progressivists I talk with believe the same things evil progressivists believe, and differ primarily in lacking an appetite to take part in the sadism and destruction. Part of progressivist immorality consists in a stubborn incuriosity to look into who they support and the practical implications of their beliefs. This allows them to water down their immorality with amoral ignorance, and to dissociate themselves from what they passively support, while also enjoying a sense of tribal belonging and security.

Ethics is fidelity to the behavioral rules of an ethos, which includes linguistic behaviors. It is entirely possible to be highly ethical within an amoral ethos. To be truly moral, one must actively choose a moral ethos. But most people are not morally responsible, and do not make such choices. They are merely ethical, and fail to make moral choices of any kind.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, and in the compulsivly identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is attributable to this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.

Equalities

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

In a liberal-democratic order we are equal as citizens before the law.

In communion we are equal as souls within God.

In society, however we are not equals before one another. We assume roles and perform them within hierarchical systems — and these roles cary varying degrees of responsibility and authority. But in this social inequality, we must always remember our spiritual and political equality.

But those who do not understand the existence of political and spiritual have cannot know spiritual and political equality. So they can only conceive achieving equality in the social domain. Some demand equality from every social order, which is impossible, while others, noting the impossibility of social equality, deny the possibility of any equality. These are the origin of left illiberalism and right illiberalism, respectively.

The ethic and ethos of liberalism

Ethics, Politics

Liberalism is not a morality. Liberalism is an ethic.

The distinction I am making here is this: Morality is unconditional; ethics is contingent upon ethos.

An example of morality is rejection of sadism. There is never a situation where sadism, especially extreme sadism like that of Hamas on October 7th, is justified. Anyone who cannot understand this is a sociopath, or is morally confused to the point of sociopathy. Sadism can be explained, but explanations are not justifications. I am saying here that not only is sadism immoral, but justification of sadism.

The value of a liberal ethic is entirely instrumental. An ethic is a means to the end of supporting a liberal social order — a liberal ethos.

(A point where morality and ethics connect. Morality requires keeping ethical commitments. There are moral ways to renegotiate commitments, and immoral ways to break them. I taught my children that there are no preexistent rules to relationships, but once rules are made, those rules are ethical realities one is morally obligated to honor. And then there is etiquette, which is neither moral nor ethical, but something else of enormous importance.)

For a while now, I have been declaring “mutuality is for the mutual”. When I say this, I refer to ethics, and the ethic I almost always mean is liberalism. But this is not the only ethos. Friendships of various kinds also have their own ethics. Every enduring friendship is its own ethos and has its own ethic and etiquette.

When I make the mutuality declaration what I mean is this. Where there is no liberal ethos, and no reasonable possibility of a liberal ethos, a liberal ethic is not appropriate. Where illiberals are likely to exploit liberalism to undermine a liberal ethos, it is unethical to extend the rights, privileges and courtesies to illiberals.

Yes, this is a very dangerous stance to take. Conditional liberalism is the slipperiest of slopes. But unconditional liberalism is just as slippery, and we have already slipped far from our best liberalism. I meet very few liberals under the age of 40.

And, yes, the line between liberalism and illiberalism is faint, fuzzy and ambiguous. But fuzzy boundaries do not negate the clarity we see at the extremes. We can debate how liberal Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt were, but the fact that Axis leaders were illiberal, and less liberal than Churchill and Roosevelt is beyond reasonable dispute.*

And yes, if illiberalism is presumed, liberalism cannot take root and flourish. Sometimes an intricate and delicate dance must take place between nervous and skeptical liberals to cultivate mutual trust and establish a liberal ethos. It requires both liberals to “go first” and provisionally offer one another liberal courtesies. But there is a point where dancing ends and defensive maneuvers start.

I am still working on this. It does not yet feel complete and flawless. I do think it is fundamental,y right, though, so I’m putting it out there. There will be more.

  • Note: Regarding fuzzy lines and clear extremes, if you have a shred of intellectual and moral decency in you, you will admit that, while we can (and should) debate how moral or immoral Israel’s war conduct has been, there is no room whatsoever to dispute Hamas’s evil. Witness Hamas’s enthusiastic, joyous embrace of sadism on October 7, and its explicit genocidal goals. Israel is undoubtedly morally flawed. Hamas is undoubtedly morally depraved: evil. And anyone, however soft-hearted and well-intentioned, who justifies Hamas’s evil is morally corrupt. I stop short of calling them evil, but they support and enable evil to flourish, and that is immoral.

If you care, I care

Biography, Ethics, Love

Friend, if you care about something, I care about it, too.

I care about it for the sake of its importance to you. I may care solely for that reason and no other.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you have reached, and we might never agree on what is true and right on this matter.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to explain why and justify it.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

I cannot promise to believe what you want me to believe. I cannot promise to feel what you want me to feel. But I can promise you this: I will care as much as I am able about what you care about.

And where one or the other of us refuses to care, there we find the limits of our friendship.

Evil exists, dumbass

Ethics, Judaism, Politics

We can become so idealistic about human nature that we stop believing genuine, active, positive evil is possible. We cannot believe that one person can desire and pursue the goal of inflicting misery or destruction on another person.

Then we drift into seeing evil solely in negative terms — as a refusal to desire and pursue another person’s welfare. Evil is only to be unconcerned or insensitive toward other people, or even insufficiently concerned or sensitive.

Such people can, perversely, fail to understand the necessity of defense against evil, and the unavoidable consequences of such defenses. Perhaps if the defender had been more concerned or sensitive to those who needed it, there would never have been conflict or need for defense.

And blind to the reality of positive evil and consequently the necessity of defense, such people see evil only in the defense, in the form of insufficient concern and sensitivity toward the innocent victims — innocent victims accidentally but inevitably and unavoidably harmed in every war, however carefully and humanely fought.

If you cannot consider the reality of positive evil, your thinking on Israel will be both stupid and callous, however intelligent and empathetic you believe yourself to be.

Continue reading Evil exists, dumbass →

Some dreams are just for you

Ethics

Some things are for us, alone, to do.

We, alone, decide what our identity is or is not, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is bigotry.

We, alone, decide if we are to be held to a higher standard, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is a double-standard.

We, alone, decide what we must sacrifice to live up to our higher standard. When you do that for others, that is human sacrifice.

You decide these things for yourself, alone; I decide these things for myself alone.

Unsolicited advice, to take or leave. You decide:

Find the people with whom you identify, who accept you as one of them, and participate in that community. Then you will have an identity. Did you know that identity is something you do with others, not a classification of what you are?

Live the ideal that inspires you. Do the inner and outer work your conscience calls you to do. Then you will have an ethic. Did you know that an ethic is a way to inhabit an ethos, not a set of codes and criteria to which one must conform, by which one is judged?

Make the sacrifices you feel compelled to make. Then you will have a greater self. Did you know that nobody makes sacrifices to others? All sacrifices are made to one’s greater self or to one’s petty self.

Dreams are a genre of art for an audience of one.

Ethos, ethic, game and rule

Ethics

Borrowing from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, I want to experiment with a rhetorical approach of speaking of ethics in terms of games and rules.

Every ethic belongs to an ethos and serves that ethos.

Apart from the ethos it serves, though, an ethic is meaningless.

Following an ethical rule outside the context of its ethos is absurd, just as following the rules of a game outside of game-play is absurd.

Imagine, for instance, a tennis player so fanatically dedicated to the game of tennis that, even off-court, they continue following the rules of tennis, and expect others to follow the rules of tennis at all times, too.

Or imagine the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, and suddenly, without warning, the Steelers begin brawling. They are joined by their fans, who swarm out of the stands onto the field and overwhelm the Cowboys with numbers. Would the valiant Cowboys continue playing by the rules of football, avoiding holding and unnecessary roughness penalties, while the Pittsburgh hooligans subject them to atomic super-wedgies and hang them from the goalposts by their blown-out waistbands?

Now imagine, following their 821-0 victory over the Cowboys, the Steelers hooligans move up the street to the basketball arena and storm the court where the Dallas Mavericks are playing. The Steelers and their hooligans crowd onto the court and score touchdown after touchdown against the confused and defenseless Mavericks. The Mavericks take the high road and stick to the rules of basketball, but they score neither baskets nor touchdowns. They score only moral points, and these do not count toward victory. Eventually, using their new formula for victory, the Steelers become the champions not only of the NFL, but also the NBA, the WNBA, the MLB, NHL and every Olympic event.

When the game changes, the rules change with it.

The problem is, a great many of us mistake our own ethos for reality itself. And we mistake the rules of our own ethos, our ethic, for absolute universally-binding laws of human conduct, which all decent people must follow. We continue following the rules of the game off-court, and expect others to do as well, even if they’ve never agreed to participate in our ethos — or even reject our ethos.

In the future, when someone invokes an ethical principle, my first question will be: To what game does this rule belong? Am I obligated to play this game? Did I explicitly or implicitly consent to it?

If I am obligated, I will ask for clarification on the rules that bind both parties, and on who referees these rules?

If I am not obligated, I will recognize that I am in a far more interesting game: the game of determining the game, the rules of the game, and the referee of the rules.

The ressentiment generator

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I just said out loud a thought that has been gestating in me.

I posted it in response to Radical Radha‘s excellent Substack article, “Applying the Bhagavad-Gita to modern life”.

My danger is fury toward progressivism and its mind-boggling hypocrisy. Progressivism itself is blatantly guilty of everything it projects on patriarchy, whiteness, heteronormativity, etc. I’m constantly — obsessively, compulsively — trying to turn progressivism’s critique back on itself, trying to make progressivists acknowledge what they are really doing. I’ll say “Do a search and replace on DiAngelo, replacing ‘White’ with ‘Woke’ and you can see what’s really going on.” But it never works. They refuse to apply their principles to their own movement. They will never “do the work” when it threatens the real source of their privilege and power. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But in my better moments I suspect the problem has nothing to do with choice of target, and that the root problem is with the critical logic itself. Regardless of target — regardless of whether a real oppressor or some phony surrogate is in the critical cross-hairs — this philosophy itself is a ressentiment generator, and whoever uses it will radiate misery.

Trouble, divergence, alignment, diversity

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Philosophy

In my field of human centered design, it is understood that before any group of people can collaborate effectively on anything, they must first align on the problem and then align on the solution.

What does this mean? Aligning on a problem means to share a conception of the problem — to think about it in roughly the same way. It is important to note here that until a problem is conceived, it is not even a problem — it is a troublesome situation.

And troublesome situations have the potential to be problematized in divergent ways implying diverging paths to a solutions. More often than not, groups confronting troublesome situations problematize the trouble in divergent ways, compounding the trouble, because now stubborn, troublesome people appear to block the way to a solution.

This happens for at least three big reasons.

Big Reason Number One is personality. Individual persons with different temperaments, sensibilities and capabilities understand and perceive the world differently in both subtle and dramatic ways, and notice different aspect of situations.

Big Reason Number Two is discipline. When people from different backgrounds confront a troublesome situation, they tend to notice very different features of the problem. Specifically, the notice symptoms of problems they specialize in solving. Different disciplines conceive problems in different and incompatible ways, and this is one factor that causes departmental strife in organizations.

Big Reason Number Three is the lived experience of incomplete information. Divergence of understanding is exacerbated by incomplete data. Given a smattering of facts, our habitual way of understandings (the combo of personality and expertise) fills in data gaps to complete the picture and perceive a gestalt truth. And we all have access to different smatterings and experience the smatterings in different sequences. Our early impressions condition our later ones. Being humans, a species with a need to form understandings, who prefer misunderstanding to an absence of understanding (perplexity), we immediately begin noticing whatever reinforces that sense, and tune out what threatens it. So the specific drib-and-drab sequence of data can play a role in shaping our impressions. The earliest dribs and drabs have “first mover advantage” in gestalt formation.

These three big reasons are not even exhaustive. It’s no wonder organizations are full divergent perspectives and controversy. (Contra– “against” + -versus “turned”). Generally, these circumstantial impressions and expert diagnoses of troublesome situations are not entirely wrong. Some are likely truer than others, but it is hard to determine which is truer than which. And it is somewhere between possible and likely that none are true enough for the purposes of solving the problem. As a matter of method, we designers assume none are right enough. (And if it does turn out that a preexisting truth turns out to be true enough, now we can support that truth with data and align the organization to it.)

Our job as design researchers is to go out and investigate real-life examples of the troublesome situation and expose ourselves to the profusion of data that only real life itself can offer. We see what emerges as important when we allow people to show us their situations and teach i\us how it seems to them.

This gives us a new, relevant conception of the problem rooted in the people we intend to serve with our design solutions.

Once an organization shares a common conception of the problem, they are better able to conceive solutions that they can align around.

And further evaluative research — getting feedback on prototypes of candidate solutions — allows teams to align around solutions that people consistently respond to favorably.

Aligned implementation teams can collaborate effectively on working out the solution in detail.

So, as I hope you can see, the designer’s task is largely a political one of cultivating alignment through collaborative research, modeling, ideation and craft.

I am unable to believe that this is not generally a better way to live.

When I am at my best, I conduct my life in a designerly way in accordance with my designerly faith.

My praxic taste

ANT, Anthropology, Ethics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Reading Fritz Perls, I’m struck by some common principles between Gestalt Therapy and ethnomethodology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), two of my favorite (closely associated) flavors of sociology. What interests me about the similarities is that it indicates something about my own intellectual taste, or maybe my metaphysical orientation.

These ideas fill my heart with Yes! and inspire my to underline passages and draw big stars out in the margin. I am not even sure these are two distinct principles, but rather a single two-in one principle.

  1. Do not start with a pre-existing interpretive schema, but instead, follow the phenomenon wherever it takes you. Allow the interpretation to follow from the following. The interpretive schema is what is most in question, and it is the destination of the research, not the point of departure.
  2. Do not impose your own interpretation on the subject matter, but allow the subjects involved in it to teach you their way of interpreting what is happening. Assume interpretive competence and respect it. The researcher does not know better.

The highest principle of social learning:

Follow the subject matter and allow its truth to emerge.

And another is like it:

Respect your subjects as interpretive equals.

Wrongheaded anti-Islamophobia

Ethics, Politics, Religion

Post-9/11, I was on the side of the anti-Islamophobes.

My argument was, and still is, that peaceful and liberal Muslims should not be forced into the same category with violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists.

Islamophobes ignorantly and unfairly suspected all Muslims of being covert violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists. because the category “Muslim” was more immediately real to them than actual, living Muslims in all their variety.

Essentially, I was making a “not all Muslims” argument. I suppose some bigot could have invented a “not all Muslims” meme and ridiculed me for being a decent liberal who points out the inadequacies of stereotypes, but that kind of nonsense only works on fellow bigots.

But to condemn openly violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists is not Islamophobia. Far from it. When we condemn them, we do not condemn them as Muslims, but as violent, theocratic, totalitarians.

And to excuse or celebrate openly violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists is not anti-Islamophobia. It is betraying liberalism 1) by supporting its enemies, and 2) by indulging in eubigotry, which is every bit as dehumanizing as dysbigotry.

In bigotry — whether negative dysbigotry or positive eubigotry — we reduce a person to our own mental category and our beliefs about what categorization means, and allow our own understanding to eclipse who they are and how they understand themselves. We do not afford them the dignity of transcendent reality. We approach them in the attitude of I-It as objects, not in the attitude of I-Thou as fellow subjects capable of joining us in first-person plural.