Today, I went into a place with an invoicing system that was supposedly “running slow.” I watched three customers leave in frustration before I finally walked out too. Each of us had already decided to purchase various items, but because the store’s computer system was having problems, we weren’t permitted to buy them. The store lost those sales, and probably a few customers too, all because they placed a greater importance on the logistics of the sale than the sales themselves.

Not long ago, I wanted to buy an item at a different store, but when I brought it to the cashier, the system said the item wasn’t in stock. Since it wasn’t in their computerized inventory, there was no way to generate an invoice, so they wouldn’t sell it to me. I had to buy it elsewhere. And unless they fix their inventory, that product will just sit on the shelf forever, tempting customers to buy it.

If you own a business, this kind of thing should drive you nuts. Never let a machine tell you that you can’t take your customers’ money. The whole purpose of a retail business is to sell stuff, to provide your customers with a product in exchange for their money. If people come in and decide they want to leave with something you’ve got for the agreed upon price, absolutely nothing should get in the way of that.

If the computer is down, make a paper invoice; or keep a ledger; or take a photo of the product, staple it to a piece of paper and have the client sign it. Do whatever you can to make sure that any customer willing to hand over his money will not be denied that opportunity. It doesn’t matter if it messes up your inventory or if your salespeople run the risk of an arithmetic error. Make the sale, take the client’s money and let him leave happy. Any fallout from your technical problems are your burden to bear. Don’t pass them on to the customer.

I sometimes think we’re becoming ruled by our tools. Computers are supposed to help us. When they become an impediment to achieving our larger goals, it’s time to shut them off and pick up a pen.

But the fact remains that these plot devices, despite being completely divorced from normal life experience, are so overused that they’ve become ridiculous clichés of modern entertainment. Here are a few other devices so overused and that they’re now silly:

The ticking clock. How many times have we seen a drama that conveniently introduces some artificial deadline, only to have the hero avert catastrophe at the last second? It was already old when 1960s spies were disarming bombs in the nick of time, and now it’s just tiresome and obvious.

The misunderstanding. This is the “Three’s Company” plot device, because nearly every episode of that sitcom was based on somebody mishearing, misinterpreting or misunderstanding something said by one of the other characters. A simple clarification between them would of course bring the whole house of cards tumbling down, which is why that never happens until the last scene. Although I do respect anyone who can write a whole story based entirely on a misheard fragment of a secondary conversation, I don’t respect it enough to sit through 22 minutes of it.

The car chase. The entertainment value of the car chase has been on the decline since the 1970s. You know at the outset that there are going to be a bunch of near misses, screeching tires, sparks flying, destruction, slow motion airborne shots, implausible explosions and vehicles launching themselves off unseen ramps. It’s all been done. Bo-ring. When I’m watching a movie at home, the beginning of the car chase is when I get up to grab something from the kitchen.

Don’t you knock? When writers can’t figure out a clever way to reveal something to a character, they just have him/her walk in at the precise moment necessary to catch others in a compromising position. The timing is uncanny, and it’s become such a common device that viewers can predict precisely when it’s going to happen. Apparently, nobody locks their doors in Hollywood. A variation is the discovery of a confessional document/letter/photo that just happens to be in the right place at the right time.

Bad guys can’t shoot. Entire movies are predicated on this concept. For some reason, “badness” induces a severe handicap to hand-eye coordination. Six bad guys with fully automatic weapons usually can’t hit the good guy even once from five yards away, while the good guy can pick them off at will with his six-shooter. Of course, the protagonist would be dead in the first scene if the bad guys had even 10 minutes of firearms training, so you’ve got to suspend some disbelief here. But while I can accept that they don’t teach marksmanship in bad guy school, it really irks me when there’s a guy we think is good, then later turns out to be bad and suddenly becomes a lousy shot. Stupid.

If I pull up in front of your house and start a big generator, the noise and exhaust will pollute your environment. If you object to that and take action to stop me, you’re an environmentalist.

If the local grocery store leaves all its trash piled up on the corner, stinking up the whole block and causing garbage to be blown down your street, you and your neighbors might band together to remedy that situation. You’d be environmentalists.

And if you joined an effort to prevent your neighborhood from becoming the site for a big factory that would spew pollutants into the air, you’d be an environmentalist then too.

The people who fight on a national scale for clean air, water and preservation of natural resources are just doing the same thing, but with a wider scope. The term “environmentalist” has been denigrated by political forces with specific agendas who want the public to think of “tree-huggers” or “hippies” when they hear the term. But the truth is, when you get past the labels and propaganda, we’re all environmentalists.

Stories like this make me so sad to see what my country has come to in my lifetime. It’s just heartbreaking.

I take away three key lessons:

1. Always exercise your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
2. Anyone who justifies curbing civil liberties with an argument akin to “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you’ve got nothing to worry about” needs to read this story, plus the stories of Richard Jewell, the Duke University lacrosse team, and the hundreds of people exonerated by the Innocence Project just before their government was about to murder them.
3. With very few exceptions, everything you see on television “news” programs is first designed to entertain and sensationalize in the name of profit. The goal of truthfully informing the viewership is a distant second on the priority list.

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The internet has become an incredibly easy publishing vehicle whereby anyone can mass-distribute his ideas. On the surface, that’s great. But as purveyors of this information, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? How do we know what to believe?

These days, when I see or read something new, I start by asking two questions. First, “How does this make me feel?” Because if the answer to that is really anything other than “indifferent,” I know I’ve got a potential problem with my ability to accurately interpret the topic at hand. The second question is: “What are the countering positions?” Then I go about my research with as open a mind as possible, always keeping a critical eye on those two questions.

The human brain has been proven time and again to be a flawed processing engine when it comes to determining truth:

• Studies show that an overwhelming number of us will hold onto false beliefs, so long as they’re presented prior to even the most powerful contradictory evidence.
• The phenomenon of “confirmation bias” allows us to conveniently discard information which might contradict our preconceived notions, while we quite easily accept information that “feels” right.
• We are highly prone to believing things we perceive as potential threats to our safety.
• We naturally seek patterns and infer causes, even when there is insufficient evidence to identify patters or determine causes.
• We are wired be give more weight to anecdotal evidence, especially if based on our own experience, than any objective or comprehensive examination of the topic.
• Groupthink commonly prevents us from exploring alternatives to what many around us believe.
• We are highly susceptible to logical fallacies. (The one I see most often is: correlation equals causation.)
• Any information, no matter how implausible, becomes more believable the more it is repeated.

All combined, these innate flaws make a treacherous path for truth-seekers in the information age. But given the pace of life and change today, the need to focus our attention on real problems and solutions, rather than chasing wild geese, is greater than ever.

That means it’s imperative to improve the way we process the huge amount of information that now makes it to our brains, and then distill it into objective truth. It’s not an easy task. As usually happens in human history, our technological progress has outpaced our ability to adapt behaviors to suit. Critical thinking, based on a rigorous examination of the facts, is something that many of us were never taught how to do. But we risk our very future if we don’t force ourselves to quickly evolve our thinking.

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UPDATE: The Boston Globe has an excellent article about how facts can “backfire,” causing us to entrench our positions. Among its many poignant observations is:

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

and:

The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

The full article is well worth reading.

I watched most of the health care summit that was held in Washington last week. A lot of it was just aggravating, with so much political grandstanding that I couldn’t imagine any of those gasbags actually solving real problems. But the discussion reignited some thinking that I had a couple years ago, so I thought I’d share it here.

A large part of the health care debate comes down to what each of us believes the role of government should be. Some say that health care is a privilege, and doesn’t fall within the government’s purview. Others believe that health care is a right, but as with other rights, the government’s responsibility is simply to not infringe upon it, leaving each person to attend to his own needs without interference. Still others believe that, as an individual right, health care is something that should be provided by the government. I understand all three of those viewpoints and I’d like to explore this idea a little further to reveal why I believe one of them is more in line with our national identity.

The United States of America was born out of a carefully constructed document called the Declaration of Independence. The famous preamble says that, among the “unalienable Rights” of all men are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that governments are “instituted among Men” in order “to secure these rights.”

That is, the role of government is, at the very least, to secure citizens’ natural rights, and one of those is the right to live. This is exemplified by the widely accepted view that government is responsible for things like law enforcement, sanitation, emergency response and national defense, all to prevent us from losing our lives to causes beyond our control.

On this point, I think it’s useful to focus on our military. We have armed forces to protect our government institutions, private property, the Constitution and our interests abroad. But the primary mission of our military is to protect American lives. When the nation has been attacked, we’re always talking about how many lives were lost, and we rightfully get angry at our government if we think they are failing to protect us. So, at least when it comes to foreign threats, protecting our lives is part of government’s role. To that end, our tax dollars are used to support a government-run institution that we call the Department of Defense.

The question then becomes: If it’s alright for the government to spend money protecting American citizens from foreign attackers, why is it not the government’s responsibility to protect Americans when the attacker is a virus, or a hereditary ailment, or cancer, or an accidental fall?

This issue comes even more sharply into focus when you look at the real threats to our lives. The following chart shows the biggest killers of Americans over an eight-year period.

The number of Americans killed by foreign powers during the same period, including by terrorism, is so miniscule that it’s difficult to show. The green box below symbolizes all American deaths for the timeframe, with the small white dot in the upper left corner representing the proportion of casualties from foreign aggression.

source: CDC

I’m not a big fan of government spending. In fact, I think the government over-taxes and wastes a huge amount of resources. But there are some big projects that benefit every citizen; projects that fall directly within the government’s mandate and which cannot be as equitably accomplished by the free market. Pooling tax dollars to protect all American lives is one of those endeavors, and there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental difference between doing that through the military and doing it through a national health care plan — other than the fact that health problems are a much greater threat to Americans than anything the military is protecting us from.

What our current policy says to people is: “If you happen to be attacked or threatened by a person, domestic or foreign, we will protect you. But if your attacker is a foreign body, such as a virus, bacterium, falling object, cancer, etc.; sorry, you’re on your own.” That makes no sense to me, and it makes no sense to the citizens of every other modern, industrialized nation.

Those nations have already had this debate, and they’ve come to the conclusion that some type of national health care system is the right way to go. Here’s a great Frontline episode examining five such systems. In every one of those countries, the citizens pay significantly less for health care (either through taxes or regulated insurance) than Americans do, and get better overall results. We deserve better.

The goal should be NON-partisan, not bipartisan.

I’m getting really tired of the White House touting all of their “bipartisan” efforts. Why should partisanship have anything to do with good policy? I understand that there are political realities in getting legislation passed, but if you’re appointing a commission to study an issue and offer solutions, it should be nonpartisan, not bipartisan.

The persistent idea that all policy issues come down to a conflict between two predetermined sides is akin to saying there are two kinds of music, country and western, and we’re going to appoint a commission whose members are fans of each to determine which style we’ll play in our nation. Just as there are dozens of popular music styles, there are many good policy ideas which don’t currently fall under the Republican or Democratic banners. Why limit ourselves to only the ones that do?

The Washington political cyclone seems to have blotted out the reality that roughly one third of voters do not identify themselves as either Republican or Democrat, so it’s no wonder they feel the government doesn’t represent them. Please open up the process.

There I go, tilting at windmills again.

It struck me as both funny and profoundly true. Far from remembering it, I wonder how many people even know what the Enlightenment was.

The Enlightenment, also sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a period in Western history where philosophers, predominantly in France but also in other countries, cast aside old notions of superstition and governance, and promoted instead concepts of reason, natural rights, democracy, freedom and equality. The ideas caught on and the result was a blooming of reason and scientific thought the likes of which the world had never experienced. It also gave birth to many new republics, the first of which was the United States of America, whose founders were greatly influenced by Enlightenment philosophy.

The topic is not something I was taught much about in school, so I imagine that many Americans, who owe their country to Enlightenment philosophies and ideals, don’t know much about it either. The way I was taught, the American Revolution was entirely homegrown, and other nations followed by the colonies’ example. But that’s not how it went. The discussions and writings in Europe at the time strongly influenced the founders. Prior to this period, the mere notion of a nation governed democratically, with the power vested in the people instead of the church or monarchy, was unimaginable.

It would do us some good to look back a few hundred years and remember where we came from.