This is a fantastic little article, thanks for sharing.
>>The mask acts, not as a tool, but as a talisman.<<
I think you really hit on something with this. I will call it your 'Tool/Talisman' framework. It's hard to break through to people in the 'Talisman' mindset. They rarely seem interested in the fundamental mechanisms that inform common instructions. For example, which dish-scrubber tool is best for crevices, or how air circulation might affect viral load per unit air volume. If you try to change their behavior by sharing this information, you might be surprised to find it doesn't work.
A 'Tool'-mindset person might jump to the conclusion that the 'Talisman'-mindset person is lazy, stupid, or both. In my experience, the disconnect is actually much deeper and more unusual than this. It's like a fundamental disagreement about the level of agency a person has in a given situation, or what grace/understanding a person is owed by virtue of the effort they've put into the problem.
It has interesting ramifications for how to enact change. A 'Tool'-mindset person might think sharing more information would improve outcomes. Perhaps, introducing a new talisman might actually be more effective. For example, a 'Tool'-mindset person might think to lecture your friend about the dangers of salmonella from raw chicken. In reality, it might be more effective to institute an across-the-board rule that no wooden utensils are allowed in the kitchen.
For clarity-- I don't think I'm some super-genius who always has a 'Tool'-mindset. Probably I have a 'Talisman' mindset about many things as well-- it's just difficult to identify which.
David, I'm going to borrow your lesson SO many times! Many of us humans grow up acquiring too many habits just to avoid being spanked. I will definitely use your tool/talisman to explain kids stuff, and to talk about advocacy. Thank you!
I wonder if the ‘talisman’ analogy was quite apt there.
I was thinking how religions, some —I'm thinking here of Judaism and Islam— have rituals of washing consecrated, and generally put emphasis on matters of un/cleanliness.
You don't do the moves because you understand them, but because god's willing. And I suppose it had had a positive public health effect, even if in some cases it was fulfilled as you have described — wetting the fingers, say, to ‘have done hand washing’.
as a Muslim, i’ll have to disagree with this and maybe it’s a blindspot to the otherwise intriguing tool/talisman label
it’s something present in the mask wearing during covid example too. sometimes you don’t do something for the outcomes, or at least not the primary ones. i make small talk w the neighbour not because I want to know about his family, but for something deeper. many wore masks not for protection but to stay within the law, to be able to participate in society/the economy.
maybe we could call it a Ticket? you don’t buy a ticket to have a ticket, but for something else. that doesn’t make it a tool but not a talisman either.
Definitely agree that many behaviours have important social or ritual functions separate or complementary to any outcome-orientation they might have, but I think the most interesting thing about the mask example is that I still see the behaviour present in people long after mask-wearing stopped being normal.
I think you're absolutely right that during COVID you did see a lot of people who didn't really care doing things because it was socially enforced, and that was... at least better than them not doing the things (though often not much), but I think if you're still wearing a mask at this point you *do* care, and you're just failing to act on that caring competently for whatever reason, in a way that makes it separate from how people behaved during the height of the pandemic.
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."
Those two cases make total sense, and as I said in my other comment, there are two entirely different scenarios that differ in their frequency of occurring. In my experience, and it is my experience and not yours, it's almost never shipping code that doesn't run and leaving chicken on mallets. It's almost always caring about things one should not care about. I'm not saying it never happens, because my roommate has sometimes put away dishes that didn't get clean, and my co-workers sometimes give me a code review of code that doesn't run. And you know what, none of my successful relationships have resulted from My go-to thought to be accusing them of not caring about their basic obligations to others. My very first thought, my go-to thought, is to be curious that they might (just might) have better priorities than me under the circumstances. And when I asked, sometimes it turned out they did. I know! The chicken mallet and non-running code examples sound really really bad. But the number of times I have updated my priorities to make something stop mattering, like throwing the chicken mallet in the trash, have vastly outnumbered the times when I updated my priorities to invest even harder.
I think that I've run into too many cases where they've clearly not had better priorities, and you've run into too many cases where people are clearly quite intense about something that you perceive as not mattering, and as a result we're both getting quite het up about versions of each other that are more like those past experiences than we respectively are.
I don't get mad at people if sometimes dishes get put away a bit dirty. I do that sometimes too. It's an easy mistake to make, and it would be insane to get shouty over it. I do think that if I routinely have to rewash the oven tray because it's covered in a thick layer of grease every time they've washed it up (non-hypothetical example at a lower level of intensity than chicken mallet) then I have straightforwardly better priorities here and they are not approaching the washing up with an appropriate attitude of "the purpose of washing up is for things to be clean". I will not, generally, do this by yelling at them about their basic duty to others, and will just point out the problem, but if they persist in doing it or treat it as unimportant for long enough I might start doing this.
I've particularly run into this with coworkers in the past where they've routinely caused problems and relied on others to cover for them and never seemed willing to change their ways and as a result I was constantly having to do work that was not my primary focus to fix shit they'd left broken.
Something I do want to emphasise is that I'm not usually asking people to put in orders of magnitude more work. They're already doing 90% of the work. I'm asking them to do the remaining 10% required so that I can actually rely on them and not have to redo their work or route around them.
You might be wondering how to get to this thing you claim to want. You claim in this essay to want people to actually care more. Here's a suggestion for how to do that.
I've been roleplaying the situation you say you often find yourself in, since I'm frequently on the other side of the interaction. Most of those I've interacted with, who played your role in the interaction, seemed to take for granted that everyone agrees with them on what is "succeeding" and that we should care about it.
If they can manage to get past that, they then start venting to the general public on the internet without naming any names.
If they can get past that, they'll actually direct their dissatisfaction to me, with a haranguing lecture.
Very few of them actually ask, sincerely, to know why I'm acting the way I'm acting. And then I tell them I believe it is not "success", and what I care about is to NOT care about it. I care about you and your satisfaction. When I do the task, I DID look at the outcome, and I don't see the differences you see, because I don't think the tasks needs doing. If you [move out of my house/we aren't co-workers/you leave the maker space], I just don't do it at all during that time, and life isn't worse, it's better. I'm doing it for your anxiety, just for your anxiety, only to ease your anxiety, the ability to check the outcome and think you see a difference stems from your anxiety. Yours. The reason I don't get better at the task is that you won't explain what on earth this supposedly accomplishes because of how obvious it is to you.
Even if wee don't persuade each other, this dialog is the foundation of forming an actual team.
Anyway, look, you're clearly very worked up about something, but I think you're getting mad at phantoms in your head and people in your past who aren't me rather than the actual thing that I've actually written, and I'm not really in the mood for dealing with that right now.
It's entirely possible that we are talking about sufficiently different scenarios that we are talking past each other, but I'm going to struggle to respond politely to this comment.
Here's my best attempt, but it's not very good.
If you think shipping code that actually works (in the sense that it meets the specification for the feature) or not leaving dried chicken on things you wash up is because of my anxiety about these things rather than your basic duty in doing these tasks, we're not likely to have a very productive conversation about it.
I have seen far too many fail in really major ways and not really regard it as their problem to take "life isn't worth, it's better" as meaning anything other than "I don't care about my basic obligations to others".
If you find yourself "getting harangued" about this, I suggest that this is because the systematic inattention you seem so proud of, you are also applying to people's feedback, and as a result you're not listening until they're shouting.
The meat tenderizer is not a solution, it's a problem. Instead of solving the problem, dissolve it, by throwing away the tenderizer.
It's unclear to me whether we agree on how often what's happening here is one or the other of the following two things.
1. Someone is intrinsically motivated to get the outcome, but is so invested in systematicity (which works through detachment from purpose) that they think they can get it with rote formulae without checking.
2. Someone has no good reason to care about the outcome, but cares about an extrinsic motivation, and what they did is probably the best way to get that.
here is my model of the situation, based in some anecdotes and the Levels of Simulacra mode:
when i lived with my parents, i didn't clean dishes because i wanted them to be clean, but to prevent my mother to be angry at me.
i now live alone, and i clean dishes so they will be clean, and THIS IS DIFFERENT ALGORITHM!
and the avoiding-blame algorithm suppress the actually-doing-the-thing algorithm. it suppress is even in clear cut and physical thing like dishes, when i and my mom have the same standard about cleanliness. but she wanted that i wash them right now and i didn't and this ruined it all. i just gave up on all the "cleaning my room" thingy for years, because my mother standarts where unachievable. she always looked on what i did and find something bad, so there was no reason for me to bother. but she gave up on me too, and years after i learned to order my things because i wanted to.
the modern world have a lot of people do things they consider useless and do on the 3 level of Simulacra. they (we) really don't want the thing! we want other people to leave as alone in peace and not bother us, and if we play by the rules we can avoid blame, so that's it.
and people lack granularity, and tend to get lost on the third level. the avoid-blame motivation replace the actual one. in the same way it is said that external motivation replace internal.
so people ACTUALLY doing ritual and ACTUALLY not trying to win. and you will not be able to make people stop doing that, until they will have actual option of not doing the thing.
for example, there are a lot of useless cleaning rituals that my mother is doing and i simple not, or once in a year feel desire to clean the window and do that.
but even knowing this is happening and seeing this dynamic, i wasn't able to cancel it, and make washing dishes something i do for real and not to avoid blame, as long as the blame was there, waiting for me to slip to start being blamey and nasty.
and this is why moving out was so freeing, despite the actual numbers of things i have to do went up. i chose to do that, instead of being forced to, and it make enormous difference. and when i don't want to? then i just don't wash the dishes! i can do that!
she sound like she stuck in the place i was when i lived with my parents. and let's say my work is full if bulshit tests that doesn't test anything and there because Sonar is stupid. (and this is, like, half of the reason i leaving my job).
the real thing is "stop to doing that if you don't want to do that, or do that for real", and for as long as people can't or feel like they can't stop, there wil be the performative-doing of the task.
This is a fantastic little article, thanks for sharing.
>>The mask acts, not as a tool, but as a talisman.<<
I think you really hit on something with this. I will call it your 'Tool/Talisman' framework. It's hard to break through to people in the 'Talisman' mindset. They rarely seem interested in the fundamental mechanisms that inform common instructions. For example, which dish-scrubber tool is best for crevices, or how air circulation might affect viral load per unit air volume. If you try to change their behavior by sharing this information, you might be surprised to find it doesn't work.
A 'Tool'-mindset person might jump to the conclusion that the 'Talisman'-mindset person is lazy, stupid, or both. In my experience, the disconnect is actually much deeper and more unusual than this. It's like a fundamental disagreement about the level of agency a person has in a given situation, or what grace/understanding a person is owed by virtue of the effort they've put into the problem.
It has interesting ramifications for how to enact change. A 'Tool'-mindset person might think sharing more information would improve outcomes. Perhaps, introducing a new talisman might actually be more effective. For example, a 'Tool'-mindset person might think to lecture your friend about the dangers of salmonella from raw chicken. In reality, it might be more effective to institute an across-the-board rule that no wooden utensils are allowed in the kitchen.
For clarity-- I don't think I'm some super-genius who always has a 'Tool'-mindset. Probably I have a 'Talisman' mindset about many things as well-- it's just difficult to identify which.
Great article. You might enjoy this, was reminded of it: https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares
This rant reflects how I feel 60% of my time!
David, I'm going to borrow your lesson SO many times! Many of us humans grow up acquiring too many habits just to avoid being spanked. I will definitely use your tool/talisman to explain kids stuff, and to talk about advocacy. Thank you!
I wonder if the ‘talisman’ analogy was quite apt there.
I was thinking how religions, some —I'm thinking here of Judaism and Islam— have rituals of washing consecrated, and generally put emphasis on matters of un/cleanliness.
You don't do the moves because you understand them, but because god's willing. And I suppose it had had a positive public health effect, even if in some cases it was fulfilled as you have described — wetting the fingers, say, to ‘have done hand washing’.
as a Muslim, i’ll have to disagree with this and maybe it’s a blindspot to the otherwise intriguing tool/talisman label
it’s something present in the mask wearing during covid example too. sometimes you don’t do something for the outcomes, or at least not the primary ones. i make small talk w the neighbour not because I want to know about his family, but for something deeper. many wore masks not for protection but to stay within the law, to be able to participate in society/the economy.
maybe we could call it a Ticket? you don’t buy a ticket to have a ticket, but for something else. that doesn’t make it a tool but not a talisman either.
Definitely agree that many behaviours have important social or ritual functions separate or complementary to any outcome-orientation they might have, but I think the most interesting thing about the mask example is that I still see the behaviour present in people long after mask-wearing stopped being normal.
I think you're absolutely right that during COVID you did see a lot of people who didn't really care doing things because it was socially enforced, and that was... at least better than them not doing the things (though often not much), but I think if you're still wearing a mask at this point you *do* care, and you're just failing to act on that caring competently for whatever reason, in a way that makes it separate from how people behaved during the height of the pandemic.
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."
- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
Those two cases make total sense, and as I said in my other comment, there are two entirely different scenarios that differ in their frequency of occurring. In my experience, and it is my experience and not yours, it's almost never shipping code that doesn't run and leaving chicken on mallets. It's almost always caring about things one should not care about. I'm not saying it never happens, because my roommate has sometimes put away dishes that didn't get clean, and my co-workers sometimes give me a code review of code that doesn't run. And you know what, none of my successful relationships have resulted from My go-to thought to be accusing them of not caring about their basic obligations to others. My very first thought, my go-to thought, is to be curious that they might (just might) have better priorities than me under the circumstances. And when I asked, sometimes it turned out they did. I know! The chicken mallet and non-running code examples sound really really bad. But the number of times I have updated my priorities to make something stop mattering, like throwing the chicken mallet in the trash, have vastly outnumbered the times when I updated my priorities to invest even harder.
I think that I've run into too many cases where they've clearly not had better priorities, and you've run into too many cases where people are clearly quite intense about something that you perceive as not mattering, and as a result we're both getting quite het up about versions of each other that are more like those past experiences than we respectively are.
I don't get mad at people if sometimes dishes get put away a bit dirty. I do that sometimes too. It's an easy mistake to make, and it would be insane to get shouty over it. I do think that if I routinely have to rewash the oven tray because it's covered in a thick layer of grease every time they've washed it up (non-hypothetical example at a lower level of intensity than chicken mallet) then I have straightforwardly better priorities here and they are not approaching the washing up with an appropriate attitude of "the purpose of washing up is for things to be clean". I will not, generally, do this by yelling at them about their basic duty to others, and will just point out the problem, but if they persist in doing it or treat it as unimportant for long enough I might start doing this.
I've particularly run into this with coworkers in the past where they've routinely caused problems and relied on others to cover for them and never seemed willing to change their ways and as a result I was constantly having to do work that was not my primary focus to fix shit they'd left broken.
Something I do want to emphasise is that I'm not usually asking people to put in orders of magnitude more work. They're already doing 90% of the work. I'm asking them to do the remaining 10% required so that I can actually rely on them and not have to redo their work or route around them.
You might be wondering how to get to this thing you claim to want. You claim in this essay to want people to actually care more. Here's a suggestion for how to do that.
I've been roleplaying the situation you say you often find yourself in, since I'm frequently on the other side of the interaction. Most of those I've interacted with, who played your role in the interaction, seemed to take for granted that everyone agrees with them on what is "succeeding" and that we should care about it.
If they can manage to get past that, they then start venting to the general public on the internet without naming any names.
If they can get past that, they'll actually direct their dissatisfaction to me, with a haranguing lecture.
Very few of them actually ask, sincerely, to know why I'm acting the way I'm acting. And then I tell them I believe it is not "success", and what I care about is to NOT care about it. I care about you and your satisfaction. When I do the task, I DID look at the outcome, and I don't see the differences you see, because I don't think the tasks needs doing. If you [move out of my house/we aren't co-workers/you leave the maker space], I just don't do it at all during that time, and life isn't worse, it's better. I'm doing it for your anxiety, just for your anxiety, only to ease your anxiety, the ability to check the outcome and think you see a difference stems from your anxiety. Yours. The reason I don't get better at the task is that you won't explain what on earth this supposedly accomplishes because of how obvious it is to you.
Even if wee don't persuade each other, this dialog is the foundation of forming an actual team.
Anyway, look, you're clearly very worked up about something, but I think you're getting mad at phantoms in your head and people in your past who aren't me rather than the actual thing that I've actually written, and I'm not really in the mood for dealing with that right now.
I apologize and thank you for your patience.
It's entirely possible that we are talking about sufficiently different scenarios that we are talking past each other, but I'm going to struggle to respond politely to this comment.
Here's my best attempt, but it's not very good.
If you think shipping code that actually works (in the sense that it meets the specification for the feature) or not leaving dried chicken on things you wash up is because of my anxiety about these things rather than your basic duty in doing these tasks, we're not likely to have a very productive conversation about it.
I have seen far too many fail in really major ways and not really regard it as their problem to take "life isn't worth, it's better" as meaning anything other than "I don't care about my basic obligations to others".
If you find yourself "getting harangued" about this, I suggest that this is because the systematic inattention you seem so proud of, you are also applying to people's feedback, and as a result you're not listening until they're shouting.
The meat tenderizer is not a solution, it's a problem. Instead of solving the problem, dissolve it, by throwing away the tenderizer.
It's unclear to me whether we agree on how often what's happening here is one or the other of the following two things.
1. Someone is intrinsically motivated to get the outcome, but is so invested in systematicity (which works through detachment from purpose) that they think they can get it with rote formulae without checking.
2. Someone has no good reason to care about the outcome, but cares about an extrinsic motivation, and what they did is probably the best way to get that.
here is my model of the situation, based in some anecdotes and the Levels of Simulacra mode:
when i lived with my parents, i didn't clean dishes because i wanted them to be clean, but to prevent my mother to be angry at me.
i now live alone, and i clean dishes so they will be clean, and THIS IS DIFFERENT ALGORITHM!
and the avoiding-blame algorithm suppress the actually-doing-the-thing algorithm. it suppress is even in clear cut and physical thing like dishes, when i and my mom have the same standard about cleanliness. but she wanted that i wash them right now and i didn't and this ruined it all. i just gave up on all the "cleaning my room" thingy for years, because my mother standarts where unachievable. she always looked on what i did and find something bad, so there was no reason for me to bother. but she gave up on me too, and years after i learned to order my things because i wanted to.
the modern world have a lot of people do things they consider useless and do on the 3 level of Simulacra. they (we) really don't want the thing! we want other people to leave as alone in peace and not bother us, and if we play by the rules we can avoid blame, so that's it.
and people lack granularity, and tend to get lost on the third level. the avoid-blame motivation replace the actual one. in the same way it is said that external motivation replace internal.
so people ACTUALLY doing ritual and ACTUALLY not trying to win. and you will not be able to make people stop doing that, until they will have actual option of not doing the thing.
for example, there are a lot of useless cleaning rituals that my mother is doing and i simple not, or once in a year feel desire to clean the window and do that.
but even knowing this is happening and seeing this dynamic, i wasn't able to cancel it, and make washing dishes something i do for real and not to avoid blame, as long as the blame was there, waiting for me to slip to start being blamey and nasty.
and this is why moving out was so freeing, despite the actual numbers of things i have to do went up. i chose to do that, instead of being forced to, and it make enormous difference. and when i don't want to? then i just don't wash the dishes! i can do that!
she sound like she stuck in the place i was when i lived with my parents. and let's say my work is full if bulshit tests that doesn't test anything and there because Sonar is stupid. (and this is, like, half of the reason i leaving my job).
the real thing is "stop to doing that if you don't want to do that, or do that for real", and for as long as people can't or feel like they can't stop, there wil be the performative-doing of the task.