–Chuang TzuIf a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty.
He would not be shouting, and not angry.
I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. There was the difficulty of living in exponential time, the impossible task of speeding policy and social change to match the rate of viral replication. I suspect that some of the political and social damage we still carry from the pandemic reflects that impossible acceleration. There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time.
But that is the kind of moment I believe we are in now. We do not have the luxury of moving this slowly in response, at least not if the technology is going to move this fast.
—Ezra Klein, This Changes Everything
I don’t remember where I first heard it but this is one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve come across in recent years, often in a very uncomfortable way.
“The output of a system is the purpose of that system”
It made me look at the harmful results of systems not as accidents or imperfections to be fixed but as intended or at least tolerated outcomes.
e.g. An economy that has homeless people is, at least in part, designed to make some people homeless.
