Disclaimer


The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Saturday, August 25, 2018

Depressing Positive Stories

There's a lot of social media stories out there about inspiring ways in which people overcome challenges, whether that's finding new jobs, raising money to deal with critical expenses, or donating various valuable things to coworkers in need. It's an inspiring example of how people can make the world better, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of these stories end up being kind of depressing, because they leave many people asking why that level of effort was necessary in order to solve a problem that could be much more easily fixed a different way. That's the topic of the blog post I found which made me want to write about this.

My focus is on a slightly different detail than trying to establish which problems are the responsibility of society as a whole or government to solve, though. To me, one of the most significant points to come out of these stories is that the solutions which the people in them manage to find and use aren't the sort of things that will work for everyone. 

Not everyone has the time to come up with detailed pictures and write-ups to accompany their GoFundMe campaign, particularly not when they're also battling illness - and even those that do have to rely at least a little bit on luck, since it's not like there's a consistently applied standard for what goes viral. And, indeed, something like 90% of all of those campaigns fail - so do we really want to rely on something with that level of success to ensure everyone can pay for medical care?

There was another story about Domino's paying $5,000 to fix potholes in the city of Milwaukee as part of an advertising campaign. Which is certainly nice, but the city of Milwaukee has a public works budget right around $140 million. I don't think relying on private businesses and organizations to make up all of that money is going to happen anytime soon, assuming we even could find sufficient reasons to persuade them to do so.

Or how about the story of the California man that handed out resumes instead of panhandling and got tons of job offers? Well, what do we think would happen if every panhandler was handing out resumes as well? What used to be an example of ingenuity would become routine, and handing out resumes by the side of the road would almost certainly become no more successful than any other means of job hunting - with the caveat that a level of effort not previously considered necessary would now be required.

Worse yet, these stories contribute to the same attribution errors that routinely interfere with our ability to determine what truly contributes to success and failure and what level of effort is reasonable to expect out of people. The story about the superintendent who painted one of his schools over the summer is a great example, and the blog post I originally saw quite clearly explains that a senior administrator spending his time on that job should not be considered normal or required. A superintendent who chooses to do their actual job instead of something like painting shouldn't feel like they've failed. Neither should someone who has been putting a good level of effort into their job hunt without success feel like they've failed because they didn't try something truly unusual, nor should someone who has no vacation days to give to their pregnant or sick coworkers because they actually wanted to use the benefit that comes with their job feel like they've done something wrong - and yet these stories promote a world in which all of these people have.

We can do a better job - as a country and as a society - of finding ways that will actually work to solve these problems. Making a big deal out of specific individual examples that aren't generally applicable isn't going to help us get there. It'll just give us a reason to believe that we only need to support people if they're putting in a superhuman effort already. I'd much rather have a world in which we don't demand that people meet an unreasonable standard before we help them.

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