Are you sure you are correct?
It is often the situation that I ask someone to do something, or why they are doing something the way they are (policy, etc.), and an argument will ensue where they try to tell/teach me why it has to be the way it is.
The pattern to this is consistent and frequent enough — and ends in the same fashion — that it warrants its own name. I call it the Fire Door of Procrustes.
A little background. There was a person named Procrustes (and went by many other names as well) who offered beds to tired travellers. In one telling, he had two beds, one big and one small.
On the big bed, he would put those short in height, and with a hammer he would beat them, to become longer. The tall ones, he would put them on the small bed, and he would chop their legs, to fit the bed.
One of the more simple but archetypal examples was in one of my old offices, we had a rear door from our office that exited out to some stairs. It sported a standard single deadbolt, and the door remained locked.
One of my employees came to me and said this was a fire door, and that the door must be unlocked during working hours. At this moment, I smiled (knowing the conversation that was about to ensue) and said: ‘But if you unlock it, then people can just walk in and steal our stuff.’
He reiterated his point that it was the law. To which I said ‘Yes, I know the law, and I understand their goal. But we must not let thieves walk in.’
The conversation escalated, because, to his ear, I was saying he could not leave the door unlocked. Where rather I was saying ‘We can not let thieves walk in.’
The solution was simple, but for some reason was outside his thought process. For him this was quite black and white, the law says ‘This door must remain open during working hours.’ Actually (and this is important) the written law says
‘Exit doors shall be openable from the inside without the use of a key or any special knowledge or effort.’
Quite a different issue.
For some reason, this was emotional to him, and he positioned the debate that I was ‘breaking the law,’ and thus the conversation continued to escalate. I chose this time to state in no uncertain terms ‘people must not be able to just walk into our offices,’ knowing this added fuel to the fire shall we say, which sent him over the edge as expected, and he walked out, angry.
Later, when he had calmed down, he asked me what I wanted to do about the fire door. Elated he finally was asking as opposed to stating — I said ‘easy, have the landlord fix the door, it is currently not in compliance with safety-code, which is their responsibility.’ And so began the systematic realization on his part that they make doors that ‘lock’ from the outside, but open from the inside automatically. A separate deadbolt lock can remain in place, for when the building is empty. Procrustean ideas or rules are ones which are often inherited, or are not based on ‘complete reason.’
1st person ‘You can’t do that!’
2nd ‘Why not?’
‘Because we never do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘These are the rules! You trying to cause trouble?’
All rules/constructs need to be understood, in intention, purpose, history, and description. Most rules don’t encode this, nor do they encode examples, or ranges (what to do in extraordinary cases, or at the extremes on either side). See also Chesterton’s fence. It is for this reason I want all laws to incorporate a fail-safe. Which is to say, each law must continue to defend itself. Be reviewed annually, or some reasonable time, and proven (from data) that it is effective in its goal.
And here is where wars begin, continue, and then ensure their ongoing survival.
Procrustean is one of my top 10 favourite words. What, you don’t have a top 10 favourite word list? Well, over the years I’ve been gathering words, that on their own are so powerful, so needed, so packed with purpose and value, and to all humans, they deserve deep consideration and reflection. Over time I will devote an entire entry to each word.
Cargo cults
Connected for me in a Venn diagram way, are cargo cults.
A Cargo cult is defined as a ‘belief system, in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced society to deliver goods.’
Famed Physicist and thinker Richard Feynman expounded on this and refers to it as a Cargo Cult Science (because it is elitist and probably bigoted or even racist to apply it to more primitive cultures. Rather, it is simply common to all humans):
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
As a cognitive computer scientist, I’m interested in self-correcting systems. In other words, systems review their own output (feeding it back into itself) for optimal or optimum results.
Sometimes, we even need to introduce random or purposefully abhorrent data just to check the system itself. This can reveal our biases or illusions.
Thus, to be procrustean forces uniformity, conformity, draconian law if you will. And most importantly, without consideration for natural laws, results, humanity, etc. No feedback loop.
Cargo Cult Science is a pseudoscientific method that starts with an assumed hypothesis, and just, leaves it there. No feedback loop.
Many relationship problems, personal, and business, can be solved with this very simple bit of advice:
Don’t state; ask.
Meaning, make no assumptions, even if it seems it must be an axiom, or assumed by the other party, or that most people would think the way you do (they don’t).
Sometimes people cut off their noses despite their faces. This idiom has Viking roots. Referring to nuns that sought to avoid the horrors of Vikings storming their churches, by disfiguring themselves, hoping the invaders would find them so repulsive they would leave them alone. But, upon discovering what the nuns had done, they were disgusted, not just visually, but philosophically, as this act is seen as insane by a Viking, so they locked them inside the church and burned the whole place down. I again reference Game Theory; work backwards from tested results.
Look into yourself, and ask if you have sufficiently questioned your own assumptions and demands. Have you listened to the other side in an attempt to get a complete picture?
Ref.
Procrustes
Cargo Cult
Cargo cult science
Chesterton’s fence
Aumann’s agreement theorem
