Warranted Intolerance

In 'The Open Society and It's Enemies', Karl Popper asserted that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance. Just think about it. What if a society was 100% tolerant? The intolerant would be tolerated. They would act accordingly, marginalizing others and accruing power, until, finally, tolerance itself would be obliterated under their reign. Justice itself relies on intolerance: murder is illegal, because we are not tolerant of it, for good reason. It is only when we pass the threshold of clear, negative externalities (i.e. one person's actions causing material harm to another person) that the question of tolerance vs warranted intolerance becomes more difficult, and I can see how large the struggle looms in the minds of Americans, as we seek to embrace fellow Americans whose beliefs have been erroneously conflated with evil, with a seemingly endless supply of recruits willing to reinforce this bias by committing acts of evil. Aside from exacting huge, asymmetric financial costs on the U.S. economy, I think that part of the goal of terrorism is to skew our collective minds towards unwarranted intolerance and drive a wedge between us. That is what we have to counter at every turn, or else play right into this goal. 

Work the Love

In the 1990s, I worked for a start up and ran a group of Oracle PL/SQL developers and DBAs. One day, one of my DBAs, a very shy and soft spoken woman from China, slowly shuffled into my office in tears. I stood up and asked, "what's wrong?". She answered, "I deleted the database". I attempted to qualify: "You deleted some data?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a table?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a schema?" ... "No" ... "You dropped a tablespace?" ... "No" ... "Then what?" At this point, the tears accelerated, as she said, "I deleted the database file on Unix". Indeed, she had nuked the database, our eCommerce site was down, restoring our archived backup was not going to be straight forward, due to the manual cleanup we would need to perform first, so getting things back online was going to take 8 to 12 hours and the database would be out of sync from the get-go. One of the founders told us that "we just drove a spear through the heart of this business", while the other founder immediately left to buy a gallon of ice cream, in keeping with his habit of stress eating. Meanwhile, my shy, teary-eyed DBA stood at my side, paralyzed. I turned to her and asked: "Did anyone die?" ... "No" ... "Did anyone get physically injured?" ... "No" ... "If we both get fired, do you think we'll find new jobs?" .... "Yes" ... "Then cheer up! and go delete the rest of those database files so we have a clean slate to restore." The relief on her face and near-joy in her step as she made her way back to her desk was enough to make me fully satisfied in the job ;-) I would venture a guess that, for most of us, job satisfaction transcends the job and is rooted more in the empathy and assistance that we are able to deliver to our fellow travelers, so while I do believe that it is important to love the work that you do, I would say that it is equally important to 'work the love', and this can be done across a variety of jobs.

Scary-Movie-Scene-Moments

We've all experienced them in our lives from time to time. I had one yesterday. I was under the weather, 100% sure that I had a sinus infection, therefore my usual strategy of waiting things out was contraindicated, so I opted to go to the doctor's. While in the waiting room, I sat across from a woman wearing a leg brace who was abjectly unable to prevent whatever she was thinking or feeling from being verbally uttered on an ongoing and immediate basis. For 45 minutes straight, all I heard was "my back hurts", "my phone's battery is low", followed by, "does anybody have an iPhone charger?", "wow, that is a low co-pay", after over hearing someone's $5 co-pay amount, "I can't believe that", referring to ABC's 'Divorce Court' on the TV, etc. They finally called her back, so I enjoyed 15 minutes of peace until they called me back. After my time with the doctor, I headed to the check out desk. To my dismay, there she was, fully engaged in arguing with the receptionist about how they should be able to Google information that she was being asked to provide, occasionally looking back at me to say "unbelievable". She was rather bossy, and a bit manipulative in an addict kind of way - i.e. no sense of limits, as in "hey, can you hand me your baby so I can sell it for $100 and score some smack?". This is going to sound a bit cruel, but it looked like she might have been attractive a few thousand cigarettes, beers, and whatever else ago, so I imagine (perhaps, just my imagination) that she may have grown accustomed to a wide domain of manipulation and control. Finally, and thankfully, all issues were resolved and she left the premises. I signed some forms, paid my bill and headed to my car. Halfway from the office to my car, I hear "hey!", "yo!", "wait up!". It was her, furiously hobbling towards me, presumably to ask for a ride. Now, anyone who knows me, knows that I am the first to offer a helping hand to someone in need, but her? No! And this, my friends, was my scary-movie-scene-moment. As I pretended not to hear her, I accelerated the pace to my car, thanked God for my hands free door locks (else it would have been doubly scary, as I would have surely been hard pressed to align my key and unlock the door in time), thanked God for my push button start (for the very same reason), didn't even put my seat belt on, contemplated not even disengaging my emergency brake, though the engineer in me overruled that one, slammed it in drive, thanking God yet again that I backed into my spot, and narrowly escaped before she reached me. Typically, I would make two left turns to get back to the main road, but I could see her in my rear view mirror, already hobbling toward that route to cut me off at the pass, so I continued forward, ready to take the long way home at whatever cost. Does this make me a bad person, or simply someone with an uncanny zest for life. I think it's the latter :-)

The Most Addicting Thing

I heard a podcast today, where the thematic question was 'what is the most addictive thing in the world', where 'addiction' was duly defined as something that you cannot get enough of, but that continually requires larger doses to provide the same satisfying effect. There were many guesses - crack/cocaine, heroin, opium, alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate - but, in the end, the researchers found, after extensive surveying, that the answer was 'other people', or, to put it another way, 'love'. Yes. Love. The thing that people go crazy over, change their lives for, do anything and everything to protect. And yet, how many relationships end? Is it truly the case that the more we have it, the less we feel it's effects, the more we need of it to feel truly satisfied, leading to a point where one or both parties simply cannot give enough to ensure its survival? Does one need to create scarcity in one's relationships to balance out supply and demand and stop the viscous cycle? Deep down inside, I don't believe this to be true, based on my belief that true love transcends the logistics and dynamics of life. Perhaps this is foolish of me, but, for whatever reason, I would rather foolishly believe this than wisely live a life half-muted. This may even be, perhaps, true wisdom. I don't know. 

Know How

If you gave Isaac Newton the keys to your car and instructed him to go from point A to point B, he would have no clue. What does it mean? Intelligence does not bestow know how, and sometimes know how is essential. By that same token, know how is not an indication of intelligence, nor should it foster arrogance. This is precisely what scares me about allowing anyone with a license to drive, especially when they have no concept of the implication of F=MA.

Surprising Coincidence, Accidental Strategy and the Value of Noticing

For the past 4 days, I've been commuting from South Jersey to New York City by car, and I've been providing my borderline OCD mind with a bit of relief by keeping track of some key travel markers, which revealed a surprisingly consistent timeline, as follows:

From South Jersey

15 minutes to the NJ Turnpike Entrance
15 minutes to exit 8
15 minutes to exit 10
15 minutes to exit 14
15 minutes to Holland Tunnel entrance
15 minutes to get through the tunnel and park

I've consistently achieved this 90 minute timetable, leaving a 15 minute buffer for traffic, but often - inexplicably and unexpectedly - making up time if/when I do run into unusual traffic. To me, this is incredible, especially since the rough 15 minute intervals are so closely coincident with the markers listed. This is also something of a lesson in accidental strategy. Without knowing any better, I decided to leave at 8:15am to bypass traffic. This just happens to deposit me at exit 10 at or slightly after 9am, thereby allowing me to occupy the HOV lane, since the HOV constraint ends at 9am. This also just happens to provide a natural offset for any traffic that I run into after exit 10, since the Holland Tunnel traffic starts to trail off after 9am, thereby expediting my travel to and through the tunnel. My only contribution to this 'happenstance' is noticing, but noticing is valuable.

So now I am wondering...

What other surprising coincidences and accidental strategies currently exist in my life? What is the value of noticing? What is the opportunity cost be of not noticing? These are good questions, I think.