Tag Archives: law

Agency, not information

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One of my favourite quotes comes from Derek Sivers,

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.“

I was reminded of this in a video shared with me yesterday morning, “Can Paper Stop Tyrants?“. In it the vlogger, Tad Stoermer, shares:

“Too many people are still talking as if words act on their own; As if law acts on its own; As if constitutions act on their own; As if conventions just magically act on their own. They don’t, people act…”

He sees the futility in people waiting for action against tyranny… which simply is not coming. Then he continues with something he was told by European literary scholar, Dr. Julia Holloway:

“Evil continues when people convince themselves that stopping it is somebody else’s job… What is missing in our time is not information, it’s agency. It’s the capacity to see suffering as real, and then understand that action is required. Her point was that a culture that devalues the humanities also devalues the habits of empathy and moral imagination that make action possible.”

We seem to live in an era of outrage, whereby there is some expectation that outrage itself is action. “Can you believe this is happening?” is not a statement that prevents something from happening at that point, or in the future. Yet, that seems to be the stance most people hold.

Outrage without action is a loud but impotent form of acceptance. 

It holds no agency, and does not promote change. When conventions are broken, it’s easy to be upset, but conventions are only conventions because good people hold them up as such… and it’s that ‘holding them up’ that just isn’t happening.

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*Update: I read this by Chris Williamson after posting, and it seems too fitting with this post not to share:

“The gap between words and actions has never been bigger.

You can be the least virtuous, meanest, most dishonest human on earth, but if you say the right things on social media, the world will be unaware.

No one stress tests the words coming out of most people’s mouths.

Which means that appearing good becomes more important than being good.

Performative empathy is more rewarded than genuine empathy.

Posting about mistreated groups is more incentivised than helping mistreated groups.

Words have become more important than actions, because you can tweet the words without needing to do the actions.

It’s the path of least resistance for everyone.

This isn’t me saying that you can’t do good whilst posting about it online.

But that many (maybe even most?) of the people who proselytise about how virtuous and caring they are, and how it’s everyone else who is evil/malignant/the enemy, are allowing their morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny.

Beware the people who only say good things, but don’t do good things.“

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Jury summons

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I was due to go to court this morning for a jury summons. Last night I checked my personal email before bed to learn that it was canceled. It’s a bit of a relief for me because this is not a great time to miss work and the summons was for a 20 day criminal trial.

Like voting, I think that being summoned for jury duty is a civil duty. To participate in a free and just society, you need to support the political and judicial systems that make that society work. But I can’t imagine having to leave a job for 20 or more working days.

Perhaps there should be incentives for retired people to be jurors? I don’t know how you would design this to be fair, but I will say that I’d be much more willing to do my civic duty as a juror when I don’t have to worry about missing work. More than fixing that, I wonder if there isn’t a way to make the whole process shorter? What parts of a case in a law court could use a revamp in design and process so courts cases are less drawn out and more to the point? I honestly have no idea, but I think this is a question that’s worth looking into.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

I just went back to my very first blog post, originally written on March 29th, 2006, and added with a reflection to DavidTruss.com 2 years later. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

First of all, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 16 years! At the time of my reposting this first post onto my own website, I wrote about my 2 year journey to that point, “As I approach the two year mark since first blogging this, I can honestly say that becoming a blogger has been absolutely transformative! I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 2 years than I have in 22 years of one kind of institutional learning or another.“

Now going back to the point of that post, I wonder what the purpose of our current systems are?

Social media seems to be about gaining and keeping attention at any cost.

Governments seem to be about managing risk in wasteful ways.

Law seems to be about expensive litigation with justice sometimes prevailing.

Education seems to be about ranking students for university.

Higher education seems to be about putting students into debt to pay for credentials.

Of course there are exceptions, shining examples of how things could be. But how many of our systems do things that, if you look at them you think, that’s not the purpose of that system? And if the results aren’t what we want, if our systems keep giving us unintended results, at what point do we recognize that these results are the purpose of our systems? And then, what do we do about getting to the real, intended purposes?