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<p><code>As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice -- there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone.</code></p>
<p><code>- Kuhn</code></p>
<div class="divider">-|---- Frameworks ----|-</div>
<p>Last night I talked with my friend Katelyn over dinner. She told me about a shy young hacker at Noisebridge who had worked up the courage to speak in public. His piece was called "Conversation: The Rules of the Game", wherein he argued that <i>conversation</i> is a game, with a number of rules and a risk/reward structure.</p>
<p>"With each successful move", he explained, "you gain social capital. The safest move in the game of conversation is to simply agree with what is being said. The second safest move in the game of conversation is to say nothing at all. These actions are low risk, but have little payout."</p>
<p>"The riskiest move (but potentially the most lucrative) is the monologue. The monologue is defined as three or more sentences in succession. If you make this move, it is all or nothing! With each winning move, you accrue greater amounts of capital. With more in the pot, you can hedge bigger bets, you can afford to be more controversial."</p>
<p>I was struck by the similarity of this to another philosophy espoused, this time by a former roommate, who understood other people as black boxes:</p>
<p>"They have inputs and outputs", he said, "and you come to understand their behavior by drawing correlations between different combinations of input and output. Much like reverse-engineering a computer program."</p>
<p>I've had the misfortune of hearing many similar theories since I moved to the Valley, and they all disturb me. This essay is my attempt to explain why.</p>
<div class="divider">-------</div>
<p>I was getting breakfast with my friend Zach: a surfer and recent convert to the temple of government-dispensed pot chocolate. He was blitzed when we spoke. What was it, 10am?</p>
<p>I told him what was on my mind, how I had been unable to mount a good attack against these reductionist theories I kept running into. He was silent for a while, deep in thought. Then he said:</p>
<p>"I've got it man... think about <i>hermit crabs</i> -- they only have the home on their backs -- maybe a seashell... maybe a soda can. But it protects them; it's the only thing between them and certain doom..."</p>
<p>Oh? I laughed, told him to continue.</p>
<p>"And the hermit crab, you know, isn't stubborn... it doesn't think twice about leaving its home, if it finds better digs. My point is, you know, you can't *argue* a hermit crab out of its shell. But a funny thing happens when you lay down a nicer one, right next to it. You know?"</p>
<p>I guess it crawls into the new shell? After thinking about it, I decided his marijuana-induced metaphor held water.</p>
<p>Zach was suggesting that frameworks are to be outgrown, not abandoned. They may not be perfect, but they provide a certain refuge from the complexity of human relations. And like the hermit crab discards its shell, we inevitably shed our frameworks, providing room for growth.</p>
<p>Certainly, over the course of my life I've been wrong about many things, had to cast off many ways of thinking. But I've been fortunate to meet many wise people who have shown me new ideas, new frameworks.</p>
<p>They've shown me that relating to one another is <i>supposed</i> to be messy -- to depend so much on the ambiguity of our words and our lenses of experience. That means it's the source of a lot of beauty; some would call it magic, or at least magical.</p>
<div class="divider">-------</div>
<p>Artists touch on this magic to varying degrees, and when I think of the writers who have really inspired me -- Margaret Atwood, Ursula K Le Guin, Noam Chomsky, Virginia Wolf, Benjamin Hoff -- there are a few common themes.</p>
<p>These writers use feeling and intuition to navigate the world. They don't believe that truth can be found through pure reason; they are decidedly opposite the Objectivists. Having no endpoint to build towards, their philosophy is not a web of logic, they are no Hegel or Marx or Rand. They would not be tempted to build a labyrinthine theory of everything, because they know it would collapse under its own weight before sufficing to explain the varied world we inhabit.</p>
<p>Their "theory" is explained through stories, feelings, and impressions, which provide counterpoint to pure reason. This is not to say they would dismiss rigorous, quantified thought, but would rather embrace it as yin embraces yang.</p>
<p>In striking this balance, their world takes on a fluid aspect; it becomes very easy to reject frameworks that may be logically sound, but don't work at a <i>human</i> level. There arises a sort of 'radical openness' to shedding bad ideas.</p>
<p>I believe that this openness is what epitomizes succesful relationships, friendships, work relationships, and companies; it drives public discourse and compells us forward as a species. The faster we can find new shells, so to speak, the faster we will grow. It is our stochastic edge.</p>
<p>The real challenge lies in combatting the stickiness of bad frameworks -- ie, knowing when to throw ideas away.</p>
<div class="divider">-------</div>
<p>One pernicious idea which continues to make the rounds is the notion of the "meritocracy" as grand leveler. In this conception of the world, every person is at equal advantage, because the allocation of reward is based solely on the work we produce. If you're talented enough, you can achieve anything.</p>
<p>The trouble is that it omits class, gender, race... and in discarding these lenses, maintains a sort of logical autopoiesis, explaining <i>post-hoc</i> the success of individuals by appealing to merit. It is self-referential, like the practice of snake handling that has gained popularity in a number of Pentecostal churches -- if you get bit and die, it's because you were not faithful enough. Which, as long as people continue to buy into the initial assumption, remains inconvertible in the face of all evidence to the contrary.</p>
<p>In the meritocracy, if you did not achieve success, it's because you were not as hard-working or talented as your cohort. It's not because you were too poor to attend college, or because your career was undermined when you told the boss you were pregnant. No, these things are too pedestrian for the ardent meritocrat.</p>
<p>To dig deeper into one aspect of this fallacy, we may look to some statistics on the gender gap: the fact that women earn the majority of all undergraduate degrees, yet make up less than 20% of all computer science and IT graduates; that women earn only 82.2% of the median wage of their male counterparts; that only 28% of businesses in the USA are owned by women; that women in science are discriminated against in a <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/09/even-science-professors-think-men-are-smarter-women/57259/">measurable way</a> during their studies.</p>
<p>Now, if you still believe in a pure meritocracy, then you must believe the only explanatory variable behind these numbers is raw ability. In short, you believe that women are fundamentally less capable than men. Which would be fucking nonsense.</p>
<p>So, throw meritocracy away! It had its heyday, it was interesting to think about, but we have found it to be inconsistent and harmful. Now throw it away.</p>
<div class="divider">-------</div>
<p>Meritocracy is not the only bad idea ever to have graced our collective consciousness. We must look around for other detritus, and throw that away too. Then we can build anew -- we can build frameworks that move the needle, that help us create a fairer, more loving, and more effective society.</p>
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