Americans generally know about the world past their door exclusively from the media. Global warming, the economic crisis, even tennis matches. I’m always fascinated when an active tennis player goes on the show w/ MacEnroe & company. It becomes very clear that the regular commentators are rehashing platitudes largely in a vacuum. The player from the locker room knows that the guy on the court has a sore knee they’re concealing or hates playing lefties or whatever. So much of what we hear is speculation or opinion or hope masquerading as fact.

As regards the economy, they say a person with one hand in boiling water and another in freezing water is on average comfortable. National statistics are like that. One place make be totally bombed out, but another is booming. The aggregate number means little to folks in either place, though I suppose it is of some use to policy makers who do manage the aggregate…

Interesting post! I think you’re right. No legal business is free from standards of some kind. Further, those standards are imposed with the intent of protecting the public from the fallibility, neglect and/or malfeasance of the industry. As a society, we are responsible for the trade-offs involved in regulation. One cost is the higher inefficiency or cost of the process. The medical area is one where government intervention has created a substantial burden to efficiency and expense. The second is wisdom or intelligence. The government regulation of the financial industry didn’t prevent the financial collapse we experienced last year. Arguably, it facilitated it in important ways. Finally, regulation creates an expectation of safety which is not possible where humans are involved. Humans are universally fallible and so are their institutions. This is in no way to say that the government or industry associations shouldn’t move to create regulations or standards. It is to say we need to understand the trade-offs and costs.

Likewise, I find your story of attempting to control the ‘professionalism’ of sports fascinating. I am all for amateur athletics. I think it is athletics at its best. But the corrupting forces are overwhelming. I’m sure every team in your league that cares in the slightest pushes the rules to the maximum and often finds loopholes to push beyond. Likewise, we see it in professional athletics. Even golfers are taking performance enhancing supplements now, it seems! And what of sports where they deliberately create a system to keep dominance from happening? Does it serve the sport that the championship rotates yearly? At what point will fans understand that they are watching a nearly random walk?

I hadn’t thought of it before your post but you are so right! The military is the ultimate in standards based living. From the first second of boot camp, the recruit is exposed to a broad and specific set of expectations of behavior and performance. There are manuals for everything, from the way to clean a rifle to the way to wear a particular uniform. Nearly everything is standardized. I can’t think of any institution remotely matching the rigor of military standards.

It makes perfect sense that this would be the case. The military is the ultimate collective entity. Every aspect needs to be standardized so that it performs in the manner expected by the leaders. This performance must take place consistently, even under mortal stress. And the members of the organization are intensely diverse, in background, in ability, in self-discipline, in initiative. Only a powerful set of standards allows the military to perform as an effective collective.

I fully understand the logic and value of such profound standardization, but operating with this level of standardization is beyond me. I have no objection, moral or otherwise. It’s not that my life wouldn’t be simpler if I was more capable of simply adhering to standards. But based on my life experience and the self-testing I’ve done (including the learning styles in this course and Myers-Briggs), I am just not designed to operate in such a fashion.

I always remember Crichton’s discussion of chaos theory in Jurassic Park. In essence he says that nature is simply too complex to be controlled by humans. Any such attempts simply set of a long chain of unintended consequences. Quite frequently, the unintended consequences dwarf the risk that was the target of the intervention.

Market regulation has some of this aspect. Regulations very clearly set the rules on what can and cannot be done and how much risk is to be associated with what activity. That’s all well and good if the regulators are acting with perfect clarity. If they aren’t, they are channeling a whole lot of activity into a space that isn’t as it is understood to be. I don’t think we need any examples of what this might look like.

The medical field as you describe it seems to have a similar issue. No doubt HIPPA is a valuable and important protection. Our own information is deemed by our society to be private and personally owned. Yet we interact with a network of independent doctors, all working on slightly (or very) different problems independently. There is no transparency on what other doctors observe, let alone anything as life and death as drug interactions. How much better and safer medical care would be if there was a national database of patients records containing prescription records as well as all other diagnostic records. But nevermind the complexity of the endeavor to create that system, HIPPA stands obliquely but solidly in the path.

And this reminds me of 9/11 and the whole ‘Chinese Wall’ wall discussion. Efforts to protect our privacy (directly or indirectly through perceived Constitutional constraints) effectively prevented the free flow of information through the hands of those charged with keeping us safe.

My final example is nature preservation. Our efforts to prevent wildfires lead to dangerous cascades when the tipping point is reached. Likewise, ‘preserving’ on species independently throws nature out of balance and harms many species.

I do not mean to suggest that we do nothing but there is no simple answer. In a way, that is part of the answer. If we remember that there is no simple answer for any major conversation, perhaps we will tread more lightly and humbly when we go to design interventions to ‘protect’ ourselves.