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No Solutions

Entry 2305, on 2023-11-24 at 13:20:36 (Rating 3, Philosophy)

There are a couple of nice maxims out there, which I sort of like. I mean, I don't think these prove anything, or are true in every case, or should be taken too seriously, but I think they serve as a useful starting point for thinking about the world, and the current state of things.

So here they are. First, "everything has a cost", and second "there are no solutions, just trade-offs".

So what do these mean and how are they relevant? Let's look at the first one: everything has a cost. I found this one interesting recently during New Zealand's general election. Many people were recommending voting on for a party based on how many "free" handouts they were offering.

But those free prescriptions, or free dental treatment, or increased benefits for the unemployed, or whatever else, weren't free at all, of course. All the government was doing was taking money off of some of us and giving it to others. This isn't generous and it isn't to be commended. It isn't necessarily to be condemned either, because sometimes that sort of thing is necessary, but we need to be aware that nothing is ever really free, and that everything has a cost.

That's the superficial, economic meaning of the phrase, but it goes deeper than that. Every decision we make in any realm has costs. I'm writing some software right now, and I want to have the graphics look as good as possible. But higher quality images are bigger and take longer to load, use more storage etc. There's a cost in using those better images.

I want to handle every situation the user of this software might come across, so I write extra code to handle unusual situations. But that makes the program bigger and more complex, and uses up time I might spend doing something else. In other projects I have spent a lot of time creating what I thought were really cool features that the user would find valuable. When I ask them about it, they say something like "we don't use that because we don't need it". All that extra coding had a cost, and not a single person ever got anything out of it!

Often the hidden costs are obviously completely ridiculous. I listen to a podcast recently, featuring Elon Musk, and he was talking about some of the regulations SpaceX had to abide by before launching rockets.

SpaceX had to calculate how likely it was that a rocket component dropped into the ocean near launch sites would hit a shark. The organisation involved wouldn't provide data for the incidence of sharks, because it might be used illegally by people hunting sharks for shark fins. They also wouldn't provide it to another section of the same organisation who might have been able to do the calculations because they didn't trust them. Then, once that was sorted, a different organisation demanded a similar thing for whales.

Just to move on to even greater heights of absurdity, yet another group was concerned that sonic booms from rockets might interrupt seals who were breeding in the area, despite the fact that rocket launches had been happening there for years and the seal population was very healthy. SpaceX had to strap headphones to a seal to see if it was stressed by these noises. This sounds so bizarre that you would suspect it was fake, but Musk assures us that this is real.

Some people don't attach much importance to space exploration, but I do. And if you don't you should be aware that similar bureaucracy has a massive hidden cost on other projects you might approve of, like building low-cost housing for the poor.

This regulations might exists for good reasons, and each one might have only a small effect, but after a large number of them are all put in the way of a significant project of any type, there is a massive cost to pay. Protecting sharks, whales, and seals from the tiny chance of harm from a rocket is not free.

The people who dream up the regulations, limitations, policies, rules, and laws, genuinely think they are doing the right thing (at least, I think they do in the majority of cases). And if you look at the benefits from their perspective maybe those restrictions are the right solution. But they either don't factor in the costs, or ignore them because they have no direct interest in them. If you were interested in preserving the shark population, why would you care about the extra costs and delays for a space program?

Those extra burdens placed on SpaceX seemed to be free; at least to the organisation enforcing them, but in the bigger picture they certainly weren't. Actually, this reminds me of another one of my favourite short pithy sayings: "nothing is too hard for the person who doens't have to do it themselves". In other words, it is very easy to create regulations intended to fix one issue when someone else has to figure out how to make them work.

And that brings me to the second, related phrase, "there are no solutions, just trade-offs". When trying to solve a problem, many people want to find a solution which is perfect. But perfection doens't exist. There are two negative consequences to this rule...

First, if a perfect solution isn't found, a good one might be rejected (in other words, "never let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of achieving the merely good" (this is a slight paraphrase of yet another one of my favourite sayings). The real world involves compromise, and another word for perfectionism might be fanaticism.

Second, it might be possible to achieve near perfection in one area, but only by ignoring severe negative effects in another. The shark example I gave above might be an illustration of this. The organisation protecting the sharks attained near perfection, even protecting them from the incredibly tiny chance of having a rocket fall on them, but that had major negative effects for the company launching the rockets.

A better approach would have been a trade-off, where far more probable negative effects of rocket launches could have been concentrated on, and the minuscule chance a shark would be harmed by one simply ignored.

Finally, I want to briefly discuss the most significant example of trade-offs which inspired this post: free speech. There are two extremes to this argument. One side says there should be major limitations on speech because some people are "harmed" by it. The other says almost anything goes, and all speech should be allowed except for direct calls for physical violence or exposing information that should reasonably be kept private.

I tend towards the second extreme, which I'm sure my readers know by now, but there is a degree of compromise involved there. I might say something that would offend a group of people involved with the topic under discussion. For example, I might say trans women (born men) shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sport.

Many trans activists, and a proportion of the trans population, would be offended by that and demand that my speech should be silenced. I agree, there is a harm in it, because it upset someone, but remember "nothing is free" because that freedom of speech has some costs, but costs which we should be willing to bear. And because "there are no solutions, just trade-offs" we need to accept a compromise that offence is a necessary side effect of free speech. In fact, that offence is a healthy sign that speech really is free.

In general we need to "look at the big picture" (I'm full of catchphrases today), despite the fact that I don't like that phrase, because there is no "the" big picture, just "a" big picture, but we should still try. Every action has some negative consequences, nothing is free, and there are no solutions, just trade-offs.

Comment 1 (7527) by Ralph on 2023-11-24 at 14:25:32: Very logical and sane.

Comment 2 (7528) by OJB on 2023-11-26 at 10:16:48:

Thank you. I do try to provide material which is rational, which I guess means logical and sane. Sometimes I go a bit off course and go into a bit of a rant, but hey, you've got to have some fun some times!

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