The last night of the fair …

Looking up from his keyboard, he wondered to himself, “What’s another word for ‘improve’?” Sitting at a desk in a long row of identical desks, he was busy writing his umpteenth newspaper article about a local event, one he’d covered annually for nearly 10 years end-on-end. “Boost? Enhance? Augment?” He’d written this story a thousand times. Or nearly 10. Whatever. “Maybe ‘facelift’? No.” The only challenge left was to write it better. OK, differently.

And, of course, for fewer readers.

That’s when their thousand-yard stares met. Across the aisle, a colleague was similarly lost in thought. They’d begun their careers here within a few weeks of one another, when the future seemed as bright as the newsroom did electric. But today was as quiet and grey as the pages of their product, and as dull as their senses.

They shook their heads and laughed, sharing a thought without speaking. It didn’t need to be said, because it already had been — at least a thousand times. “We are wasting our lives.” So they didn’t say anything. He just nodded in resignation, and his counterpart responded in kind.

And with the unique sort of nonchalance and simpatico that only develops from 18 years of mutual suffering, his co-worker slowly closed his eyes, and softly affected his finest Morrissey falsetto:

Oh, mother,
I can feel
the soil falling over my head

He didn’t realize it then, but he would come to miss that.

TL;DR (Too loyal, didn’t read)

Yesterday I posted a brief excerpt from a New Yorker magazine article about politics. At age 42, I’m plenty old enough to have known better. Unless you were born in the handful of seconds since I began typing this sentence, you’ve most likely become aware that people tend to have strong opinions on such matters. To paraphrase one of my buddy Geoff’s more enduring and brilliantly reductive tweets, it seems that some folks believe this, whereas other folks believe that.

As is normally the case when I ignore my better judgment, repercussions ensued. It’s been forever since I gave up monitoring my follower count (and to you last few holdouts, I highly recommend it), but the qualitative fallout still stings. When someone you respect or consider a friend judges you harshly — or, indeed, at all — you find yourself suddenly taking cover in intellectual foxholes, digging in for the coming onslaught, and preparing to defend … well, what, exactly?

Curiously, as I discovered in the exchanges that followed, not one of the feathers I’d ruffled had bothered to click on the link and actually, you know, read the article. Again, a person of my vintage probably shouldn’t be surprised by this fact. But even so, it perfectly illustrates the point I apparently failed to make.

It’s a point that the article’s writer, Ezra Klein, made eloquently in writing about the work of a number of scientists and scholars: The human mind is biologically predisposed to promote its group’s interests in competition with other groups. In other words, we have evolved into exceptional “team players.” Critical thinking, as it turns out, is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for evidence to support the interests and goals we have already settled on. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.”

This seems counter-intuitive to anyone who assumes that rational, reasoned debate is firmly rooted in the cold, hard facts of objective reality. It seems less so to anyone who participated in debate club or whose thoughts ever brushed up (formally or otherwise) against the concept of epistemology. We process our objective environment through the filter of our own cognitive appraisal — which includes our beliefs, attitudes and other predispositions — to create our psychological environment, and then we judge the latter to be every bit as “real” as the former. It’s sort of like the rose-colored glasses theory, only not all of us see rose. (The hue my correspondents perceived yesterday was far closer to red.)

Or, as Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, succinctly summarized: “Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.”

It was unfortunate for at least two reasons:

1) The quote may have implied, to some, that Republicans are alone in their use of “motivated reasoning,” when, in fact, both sides of our national political divide engage in what I like to think of as “confirmation bias on steroids.” Both sides, after all, are human — something they would do well to remember from time to time.

2) I was misunderstood, which, of course, is hardly a tragedy.

Then again, when you consider why, maybe it is. Those who made an effort to contact me (because, hey, it’s easier to judge than to be curious) fell into two camps: Offended Republicans and Offended Apoliticals. Both groups made some basic assumptions about me, none of which are true.

Republicans assumed I am a Democrat. I am not. Apoliticals assumed I am a proselyte. In fact, of my 1,386 (now 1,387) posts on Tumblr, this may have been the first related to politics. But of course self-delusion feels better than cognitive dissonance, so facts be damned.

In both cases, people see what they want to see, and quite logically consider it real-world evidence in support of their established beliefs. We promote our group in competition with other groups, real or perceived. We are good team players. As unsavory as it may be to acknowledge this self-evident truth, we are just like our politicians. We are human.

It’s something we would do well to remember from time to time.

I am the 1%

Sometimes when I’m driving and another motorist comes speeding up behind me, I think to myself, “Say, that person must be in a real hurry,” and I take the earliest opportunity to move over to the right lane and let them pass.

More prevention, less punishment

I drive about six miles to get to work each day. It takes me roughly 15 minutes. Maybe five of those minutes are on an Interstate, the other 10 on city roads. During today’s commute, I saw six fellow motorists who had been pulled over by Florida State Troopers and one more who had been stopped by a local cop.

Fucking pigs, right? Yeah. It’s easy to blame the officers — and certainly at least a few of them are sanctimonious assholes who deserve our contempt — but deep down we know they’re just cogs in a complex government machine. A law enforcement career is anything but lucrative, and as taxpayers we get what we pay for. Let’s just say these folks didn’t end up in this line of work because the brain surgery center wasn’t hiring that day.

Even so, you have to wonder if those often paltry salaries are money well spent. In business, there’s a concept called “conformance costs.” The idea is that you spend a little bit of money up front to prevent problems rather than spending a lot of money after-the-fact to fix them. In other words, over the long run it costs less to do a little extra R&D and testing than it does to recall 500,000 cars to repair a faulty seat-belt latch. The latter would be called “failure costs.” And that’s what State Troopers’ salaries seem like.

We put so little effort into teaching people to be better drivers and so much into punishing them when they aren’t. (This would be less of a problem if we weren’t obsessed with only simple, objective and arguably irrelevant metrics like “speed.”) My stepfather was a driving instructor for many years, and he frequently lamented how far the standards had dropped and how difficult it was to get through to his students that driving is a privilege, not a right. They just wanted their license, sans the lesson on social responsibility — and they knew they could get it. You can be the most selfish, inconsiderate driver on the road, almost entirely oblivious to the world around you, but as long as you can execute a three-point turn and adequately navigate your way into a parallel parking space, you’ll pass the test.

Have you ever seen a State Trooper pull a driver over for moving too slowly in the left-hand lane? What about for failing to use a turn signal? Probably never, and it’s little wonder why. There’s no easily referenced yardstick for “self-absorbed asshole,” and they don’t get paid enough to use their judgment.

What about for driving under the minimum posted speed limit? Again, probably never. You might reason these drivers are usually just conforming to the flow of traffic, but isn’t that exactly what we’re normally doing when we “speed”?

Of course, even if the average cop knows better, s/he probably feels helpless to fix anything. “I’m just one GED holder, what can I do?” Look, I get it. Change is hard. I speak from experience. When I was a hopeless drunk, I was not only one of the worst drivers on the road, but I was spending a virtual fortune on “failure costs.” Each morning, I would wake up, check the driveway to see if my car was present and unscathed, then I’d make my rounds apologizing to the people I cared about for all the egregious things I’d done or said the night before.

Business analysts estimate that spending $0.08 on “conformance costs” up front can save you as much as $1 on the back end. Getting my shit together had a similar payoff. Exercising even the tiniest fraction of self-control the night before paid enormous dividends the next day. More prevention, less (self-)punishment.

It’s not easy, but you figure it out. You either figure it out or you perpetuate the endless cycle of making messes and cleaning them up, and where’s the point in that? Hey, I don’t have all the answers, but it starts with asking the right questions.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m here for you, cops. Let’s fix this thing together.

Right now I have to go register for traffic school, though.