March 20, 2022
A common point of criticism levied against people is that they do not act in consistent ways - why did you act like this in one situation, but like that in a similar one? Why aren’t your actions consistent with each other? Don’t we have to be predictable? We generally expect things to remain predictable; the sun rises every day, your hammer always hits nails, your car always turns on when you turn they key, and the door always makes that squeaking noise. We are used to predictability, routine. However, we should not hold people to the same standard; we are not machines.
A machine is deterministic. For each input, we have an idea of what the output will be. A nail gun shoots nails; a car drives in the direction you point it; a keyboard replicates letters on the screen; a machine learning model recognizes objects. Each does as it was determined to do. People are not the same. If you get in a car accident, you are free to choose the way in which you can react; you can get upset, call insurance, file a police report, call your parents, check on the passengers, or do any combination of the above. Even in the same situation, you can choose to do different things - I’ve been in three car accidents in my five years of driving (if it helps, my back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests there are an average of 2e-6 crashes/mile, and I’ve driven at least 1e6 miles over the past five years, so this is about expected, especially since one accident involved a deer) - and I’ve acted differently every time, pulled over and changed my tires in the first one, called the police to get pushed off the highway in the second, and called animal control in the third. This action inconsistency is normal, as actions are caused by underlying events that may not be obvious to the outside future. The first order events are visible, second order details not so much.
So why do we hold others to a different standard, expecting them to act the same every time? First, we do value being able to depend on people, that they will act in a positive way from your perspective every time in response to a given stressor. I do not think this excludes inconsistent action entirely; it merely restricts the actions to a subset of possible ones. And if one has an action outside of these circumstances, it is likely because the second-order details of the events caused it, and we ought to be more considerate about these hidden factors.
We should be able to expect consistency from groups of people; social organizations that have grown into a mass of individuals making decisions for the whole. In law, in bureaucracy, in administration, we should expect consistency; a mass of people approaches a machine, though a socio-biological one. But we are not automatons, and we should not expect others to be either.
On February 27, 2022, I thought it would be a great idea to create some sort of content - writing, art, coding, etc. - every day of the next month. Luckily, the alliteration worked out. This should be the twentieth post in the series.