1. Our society is not a machine:
If I were to ask most people if they thought their pet dog or cat was a machine, they would likely say “no”. Most people get that the larger world does not consist of a bunch of machines. But….we continue to try to solve problems by using models that are based on machines.
2. Change (i.e., Evolution) is not about creating perfection.
Mostly, we think about evolution as though it is trying to create the perfect organism. But evolution doesn’t care about our social values. Evolution is about continuing to evolve, and the key to that is creating variation. As much variation as possible. This is important because we tend to use whatever model of evolution we have internalized as our default model of how we change complex systems.
3. We can’t predict the future well.
It is dawning on most of us that the world seems less predictable than it has in the past. Every day brings events that are surprising. In trying to gain a foothold on this ever-changing reality, we bundle the surprises and give them some abstract name, like terrorism or disease or natural disaster. But there are many flaws in trying to bunch very different things under a single term. The most important flaw is that we try to fix them using the same response for all of them.
4. We must actively steward all resources. We never have enough.
We are beginning to become used to the idea that something (a constantly changing something) will always be in short supply. We just don’t know what it will be until it is in short supply. For example, there was a shortage of IV bags because the most important source of them was a factory in Puerto Rico and the factory stopped producing because of Hurricane Maria and our failure to respond to the devastation in a timely way. There are now chronic and ever-changing shortages of medical treatments and supports of all kinds. And shortages aren’t restricted to healthcare.
5. Driven behavior always misreads risk and uncertainty.
Risk and uncertainty are not the same. Risk applies to closed systems like gambling games. Uncertainty means that we not only don’t know, but we can’t estimate risk. Adolescent males reliably do very dangerous and stupid things that violate common sense. All driven behavior, whether toward or away from something, reliably produces errors in assessing risk and uncertainty and severe underestimation or overestimation of risk. The Fukushima nuclear disaster is a great example of confusing risk and uncertainty.
6. Ideologies will not save us, only hard creative work.
An ideology is nothing but a complicated set of assumptions that has the same flaws in the complex, rapidly changing, and unpredictable world we now all inhabit as all the mistakes in thinking I have described earlier. All belief systems are like membership cards for participation in some human community, with the accuracy or consistency of the beliefs being a low priority concern. Belief serves social but not predictive purposes.
7. Skin in the game is more important than expertise.
We have been trained to simply accept the decisions and opinions of experts all of our lives. On the other hand, people with disabilities have commonly learned that expertise does not assure respect for our lives and our choices. The larger the system, the higher the decision level, and the more distant from you, the more that decision or opinion reflects their interests, not yours.
