Occam’s RazR

(My last big post of 2007. Thanks for making Year One of Occam’s RazR such a fun ride. Please subscribe, if you haven’t already. Welcome Digg users!)

Time to channel my inner Grinch.

I was recently given a piece of chocolate, lovingly wrapped in homily. Inside the foil was written:

“Spending time is a greater gift than spending money.”

Well, isn’t that a wonderful sentiment? Too bad I can’t agree with it. I understand the intent, that spending time with loved ones around the holidays is important, and means more than any paltry gift. But it turns out that not every gift is paltry.

For instance, if I offered you $100,000 to skip Christmas with your family, you’d probably do it. Some might not, if that sum wasn’t significant to them, or they knew a relative was dying and wouldn’t be around. The value of “time” is as fluid as the circumstances surrounding you.

Utility belt

This is actually an application of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who explored many of the same areas as John Stuart Mill, and the principles of Utilitarianism. If you know enough of the variables and can string together a formula, you can calculate just about anything. If we step things down, I’m pretty sure we can find a number, “X”, that is less than $100,000 and more than zero. Your X will fluctuate, but there will be an X.

Actually, the way to think about the formula is:

[{(amount of time spent) * (value of time)} - convenience] – $amount-offered = Z.
Are we talking about an hour, or a day?
What is that time worth to you?
Is spending that time convenient, or are there hidden costs (like travel)?

• If Z > 0, turn down the offer.
• If Z < 0, take the money and run.

This sums up why some people work through the holidays when they’d rather be doing something else. But that’s just one symptom of a common problem.

Ideal chatter

The example I cite above also serves as a warning about the power of flowery language. The fact that something sounds nice doesn’t make it true. We want to believe such statements, because they serve as a badge of honor. They are a way to wear our core values on our sleeves, and earn the nodding approval of others for having our priorities aligned.

You can find examples in any realm, and it’s just as dangerous. Within the world of politics, we see ideologues who stump for votes on policies that are justified because it is “for the children,” or “for the environment.” They elevate those justifications as representing things that a priceless — yet in doing so, they strip away all value. If the environment is truly “priceless,” then any and every means is morally required to protect it. If every life is “priceless,” then you must walk on eggshells so as not to step on an ant. Oops, maybe you can’t walk on the eggshells either.

Make an omelette

You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs — and you can’t make complex life without splitting them. Repeatedly. Life is messy. We consume. We live. We stop consuming. We die. It’s the nature of being.

There are those who can’t abide scrambled eggs. Those who cling to precious tenets and ideologies as though they were sacred writ. They tend to focus their energies around that one gravitational point. Everything is about abortion, or drug legalization, or racism, or the environment, or smaller government, or what name you should call God while praying in a classroom. Elections used to come down to the moderate swing voters. Now it seems as though elections are decided by which camp of wild and fanatic ideologues shows up in numbers. They answer the bell not like prizefighters coming out for the next round, but the way Dr. Pavlov trained them to.

Theory gone cold

Ideology is merely a theory that’s gone cold. Theory is about science. It is open to question, experimentation, refinement, and outright rejection. Theories can be supplanted by other theories. Not so with ideology – which is the calcified carcass of a theory that isn’t advancing. An ideology is not scientific, in that it can never be proven wrong. Anything and everything is proof of truth – anything that is not is rejected. An ideology is tautological – a circle of illogic that feeds on itself.

We have them in the realm of Social Media, too. They sanctify certain words, and sterilize their meaning in the process. Transparency. Authenticity. Community. A herd of sacred cows that promise a lot of beef, but provide nothing in their pristine state but a load of fertilizer.

An ideal is just that — an ideal — a target — something worth shooting for. It is not the sole prism through which one examines the sum of the universe. That’s when an ideal becomes twisted into an ideology. That’s when it becomes meaningless, because it colors everything in the same way, and leaves no place for error-correction.

Flailing at straw

The ideologues do provide a perverse form of entertainment. With a vision that is monocular and monochrome (no perspective, all black-and-white), they see any criticism as polar opposite. If you are not totally with me, you are totally against me. They develop the worst-possible and easily-swattable arguments they can conjure for the enemy, and attribute them to any who aren’t in the protective fold.

You’d think the arguments could bet explosive and nasty, but no. The zealot ideologue is too busy setting up straw men in enemy territory to worry about storming the castle. I’ve seen this play out in a number of ugly disagreements this past year. Participants are talking right past each other, because they have demonized the enemy, and there’s no sense talking Buddha-nature to a dog now, is there?

I wish I had an easy solution. I wish I had an easy formula, that could even help me diagnose my own shortcomings when it comes to ideology. The old philosophers weren’t necessarily right about the way you should calculate happiness and pain. That’s a narrow mindset in and of itself, that places the inherent value of a thing along only one axis. But at the very least, pretending that one could assign a value to something previously considered “priceless” would break the rut in our thinking and get us back on stable intellectual footing.

It’s all just grist for Mill.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, utility, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, communication[/tags]