Just one, officer
Board
games such as go are much more brittle than the real world in the sense
that a small single mistake can be absolutely fatal. Whereas before the
mistake you were well ahead or the score was roughly even, after the
mistake your loss is certain, barring some divine intervention. I find
this particular aspect of board games to be highly annoying. It is a
very good thing that the real physical world and the human life in it
is much more robust. I shudder to even imagine a physical world in
which life was equally brittle as in the microworlds of various games.
A common complaint of many people who defend criminals, homeless people and other fallout from the bottom of the society is that it is unfair to "punish" anyone for a mistake. I agree. However, someone who didn't look before crossing the road and was hit by a car that left him quadriplegic gets to claim that a single mistake ruined his life, but the same explanation from a single mother working a minimum wage job or a smoker dying of lung cancer is usually ridiculous. In fact, I find it difficult to even imagine what kind of "single mistake" would cause a normal person to become chronically homeless (as opposed to someone who loses their house in a fire) or a career criminal. Perhaps such mistakes can theoretically happen, but I don't think they are likely in the real world, nor do they account for most people currently at the bottom.
Instead of one mistake that made their life go wrong, I would bet that if looked at people at the bottom with a divine all-seeing eye, you would see a series of hundreds and thousands of big and small mistakes, cumulating towards the dirty end that those people have reached. Everybody makes mistakes, but the trick is to learn from them and not repeat them, and when a mistake happens, to make an effort to correct its bad result and the trajectory that it leads to.
Since everybody makes mistakes, it is a basic rule in usability research that the system must be designed so that no single mistake can possibly be catastrophic. (And this most certainly doesn't mean showing a "Are you sure? OK Cancel" dialog after every input, or whichever is the equivalent idea in non-software systems.) A properly designed system forgives small errors, and so should the society in general. This way people wouldn't need to worry about making small mistakes, since they would have ample time to notice and correct them.
For the sake of my own blood pressure I do my best to organize my life according to this principle. One important reason I don't own or drive a car is that with automobility, a single mistake (and even worse, a single mistake by someone else) is enough to bring the curtains. And as we can see from the highway fatality rates, this is an actual risk to worry about, unlike the commonly-lamented risks of, say, being executed for murder while really being innocent, which from the public debate you might think is an actual serious risk in an average person's life if they live in a death penalty state, but which is in reality so negligible compared to other risks of death that only a severely neurotic person would worry about it. I try to understand the real risks and avoid them as much as possible. Only in the simulated virtual worlds such as the go boardgame I can tolerate the possibility of a catastropic mistake and the fact that the reality does not come with an Undo button.
(As a side note, I bet that many board games would actually improve if either player could at any time rewind the game up to, say, five moves back, with the obvious restriction on repeated rewinds. This way, small mistakes would become meaningless.)
Any complex chaotic system, especially the physical world, is sensitive to initial conditions no matter how much soft stuff I try to put between it and myself. Therefore I occasionally try to think of a realistically possible mistake that would make my current life to be much worse. In a way I am happy for not coming up with such a mistake, except the trivial ones that require active bad action from my part, but those mistakes are easy enough to avoid: just don't do that bad action. On the other hand, it makes me nervous to think that there is some threat to my existence out there which I cannot perceive until it's too late.
Organizing the society more to the direction of allowing single mistakes creates a moral hazard when its members start believing that they can get away with mistakes and start doing more stupid things, in both meanings of "more". But that's the way it has been since welfare was invented. When people don't have to worry about small mistakes, they can better concentrate in optimization in their major issues. When the world is safe and predictable, superstition and its more sophisticated form organized religion do not gain a similar foothold as it does in a world where the lightning can strike at any time unless you continuously hold certain awareness.
A common complaint of many people who defend criminals, homeless people and other fallout from the bottom of the society is that it is unfair to "punish" anyone for a mistake. I agree. However, someone who didn't look before crossing the road and was hit by a car that left him quadriplegic gets to claim that a single mistake ruined his life, but the same explanation from a single mother working a minimum wage job or a smoker dying of lung cancer is usually ridiculous. In fact, I find it difficult to even imagine what kind of "single mistake" would cause a normal person to become chronically homeless (as opposed to someone who loses their house in a fire) or a career criminal. Perhaps such mistakes can theoretically happen, but I don't think they are likely in the real world, nor do they account for most people currently at the bottom.
Instead of one mistake that made their life go wrong, I would bet that if looked at people at the bottom with a divine all-seeing eye, you would see a series of hundreds and thousands of big and small mistakes, cumulating towards the dirty end that those people have reached. Everybody makes mistakes, but the trick is to learn from them and not repeat them, and when a mistake happens, to make an effort to correct its bad result and the trajectory that it leads to.
Since everybody makes mistakes, it is a basic rule in usability research that the system must be designed so that no single mistake can possibly be catastrophic. (And this most certainly doesn't mean showing a "Are you sure? OK Cancel" dialog after every input, or whichever is the equivalent idea in non-software systems.) A properly designed system forgives small errors, and so should the society in general. This way people wouldn't need to worry about making small mistakes, since they would have ample time to notice and correct them.
For the sake of my own blood pressure I do my best to organize my life according to this principle. One important reason I don't own or drive a car is that with automobility, a single mistake (and even worse, a single mistake by someone else) is enough to bring the curtains. And as we can see from the highway fatality rates, this is an actual risk to worry about, unlike the commonly-lamented risks of, say, being executed for murder while really being innocent, which from the public debate you might think is an actual serious risk in an average person's life if they live in a death penalty state, but which is in reality so negligible compared to other risks of death that only a severely neurotic person would worry about it. I try to understand the real risks and avoid them as much as possible. Only in the simulated virtual worlds such as the go boardgame I can tolerate the possibility of a catastropic mistake and the fact that the reality does not come with an Undo button.
(As a side note, I bet that many board games would actually improve if either player could at any time rewind the game up to, say, five moves back, with the obvious restriction on repeated rewinds. This way, small mistakes would become meaningless.)
Any complex chaotic system, especially the physical world, is sensitive to initial conditions no matter how much soft stuff I try to put between it and myself. Therefore I occasionally try to think of a realistically possible mistake that would make my current life to be much worse. In a way I am happy for not coming up with such a mistake, except the trivial ones that require active bad action from my part, but those mistakes are easy enough to avoid: just don't do that bad action. On the other hand, it makes me nervous to think that there is some threat to my existence out there which I cannot perceive until it's too late.
Organizing the society more to the direction of allowing single mistakes creates a moral hazard when its members start believing that they can get away with mistakes and start doing more stupid things, in both meanings of "more". But that's the way it has been since welfare was invented. When people don't have to worry about small mistakes, they can better concentrate in optimization in their major issues. When the world is safe and predictable, superstition and its more sophisticated form organized religion do not gain a similar foothold as it does in a world where the lightning can strike at any time unless you continuously hold certain awareness.
With some people, fortunately not many, a single use of a drug can result in a difficult-to-break addiction, which is turn quite often culminates in homelessness or destitution. I believe that cocaine is especially risky in this respect. So in this sense, we can say that one mistake leads to the abyss, assuming we consider the initial use of cocaine a mistake.
To reiterate, however, this is uncommon, in most cases drug addictions develop slowly.
Peter
http://journals.aol.com/r32r38/Ironrailsironweights/
Posted by Anonymous | 10:04 PM