Can We Agree On Rules? [Pt. 1a]
Examining how we think about rules that influence our health and well-being.
The Teardown
Wednesday:: April 24th, 2024
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Refresh: No Vehicles In The Park
My first part touched on an essay by Dan Luu about rules:
Dan Luu wrote an essay about how large platforms have difficulty moderating their content because there isn’t broad agreement on the rules. There is, of course, technology to remove or flag content that violates rules. But the fundamental problem discussed in Dan’s essay focuses on rule origination. Do people running these platforms agree on what these rules should be? Do users agree how the platform they use should be policed?
I asked you, my loyal readers, to run through the game referenced in his post and report your results in the comments. The game was No Vehicles In The Park, in which you determine whether something is in park. You needed to resolve two questions to play the game:
What are vehicles?
What are parks?
Sure, these questions seem simple - almost stupid. The game provided some guidance around the approach:
Every question is about a hypothetical park. The park has a rule: "No vehicles in the park." Your job is to determine if this rule has been violated.
You might know of some rule in your jurisdiction which overrides local rules, and allows certain classes of vehicles. Please disregard these rules; the park isn't necessarily in your jurisdiction. Or perhaps your religion allows certain rules to be overridden. Again, please answer the question of whether the rule is violated (not whether the violation should be allowed).
In essence, what the game asked you to do was ignore any pre-conceived understanding of other rules, exceptions, and violations from past experience. Some of the questions had very obvious answers:
In an emergency, Tremayne, a police officer, drives his police car into the park.
Other questions tiptoed into trickier thought patterns:
Latoya pulls a wagon full of picnic supplies into the park.
Merriam-Webster defines a vehicle as: a means of carrying or transporting something.
There’s nothing in that definition about propulsion. So, in reality, most of us wouldn’t flinch at someone wheeling a wagon through a park. By contrast, someone driving a vehicle into the park would raise the eyebrows of most park patrons, right? But, both the wagon and the policy car are vehicles that violate the rule once they’re in the park.
Examining the concept of applying rules sparked an enormous debate within Y Combinator’s Hacker News community. But, it also sparked some other thinking that just appeared again in my day-to-day.
Ask yourself this question: what rules do you care to enforce in your life?
Every Day Enforcement (Or, Not)
The New York Times ran a longer-form piece about Virginia Sole-Smith, describing the subject (Virginia) with this subtitle:
In the age of Ozempic, the “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith is inspiring and infuriating her followers.
There are topics present in that phrase that I won’t address. But the article included another story beside the obvious fat vs. anti-fat war you read enough elsewhere. A concept I’ve discussed before dominated this parallel story - rules:
The sheet-pan chicken and roasted broccoli are out of the oven, and white rice is steaming on the stove. Virginia Sole-Smith, who has spent a decade writing about how women think and feel about their bodies — and how they pass along those feelings to their children through food — is about to serve dinner to her daughters, Violet, 10, and Beatrix, 6.
Sole-Smith tries not to be a short-order cook. “Respect the labor,” is how she puts it, reminding her children that if they don’t like what she has prepared, there’s other stuff to eat in the house. A pullout shelf in the pantry holds Tate’s chocolate chip cookies, Goldfish crackers, pea snaps, and chocolate kisses. There are raspberries and grape tomatoes in the fridge.
What stood out to you? To me, it was the freedom of choice in the house. A prepared meal could be shoved to the side in favor of cookies, crackers, and chocolate. Maybe instead of dinner it was just, desert, always? The overarching rule seemed to be something like eat anything, but not nothing.
The article continued with more description around the specifics of dinner and food in general in the house:
In Sole-Smith’s house there are neither “good” or “bad” foods nor “healthy” or “unhealthy” ones; doughnuts and kale hold equivalent moral value and no one polices portion size. By relieving herself and her family of rules about eating, Sole-Smith believes she will have a better chance of raising children who are proud of their bodies, trust themselves to enjoy their food and leave the table when they’re full. She serves dessert and snacks, like Cheez-Its, along with the dinner entree; her kids can eat their meal in any order.
I thought this bit conflated two related but distinct ideas:
There are rule concepts like finish your food before you watch TV, or do your homework before you hang out with your friends. These are somewhat obvious, digestible examples. They also might be food choice statements like eat X or don’t eat Y. No candy until you finish all your dinner, anyone?
There are definitions such as what is unhealthy vs. healthy on a plate. These may or may not be clear cut, depending on your word-to-actual-food translations.
I implemented this recent rule in my house: no one can watch TV until everyone else is done eating. This combination of words and concepts seemed sensible to me. I wanted to eat dinner with my daughters and not watch them sprint away for another episode of Bluey, or five. I thought there was something genuine - a connection to my two tiny humans - worth that level of maintenance and enforcement.
My day-to-day rule enforcement is a mixed bag. Underneath everything in The New York Times profile is a simple goal about parent-child relationships: you have to enforce (or relax) rules and not be a stress case while doing so. I try (and sometimes fail) to maintain a level of calm and civility. And, in my view, it’s easiest to apply and stick to a rule rather than waiver due to circumstance. What good is a routine or rule if you’re negotiating your position during every occurrence?
I’m not shy about some of my definitions either. Rather than healthy or unhealthy, I try to describe food with more factual information: more or less nutritional value. Your average grocery store pasta box doesn’t contain much nutritional value per serving. An avocado, on the other hand, does. I’m not making any comments about calories. Those figures are important to some people, for some reasons. I’m not for or against team calories.
What I also try to do is be honest and transparent with people around me, such as my daughters. It doesn’t strike me as problematic to describe why I think something is more or less health or nutritious for them, and also for my wife and me. Rather than ignore the definitions, I’m adding what I think is transparency and illustration to the base words. Maybe that sounds overbearing to you? Maybe not.
Rules, Obligations, or Violations
An interesting chain of events sometimes happens when you have additional information around the construct of a rule: you choose to violate it, despite potential consequences. The New York Times profile highlighted some of Virginia Sole Smith’s views on this behavior coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Earlier in our conversation in Cold Spring, Sole-Smith talked about all the ways in which every person undermines their own health, by drinking alcohol, say, or opting out of the gym; even people who refuse to wear motorcycle helmets are freer from judgment than fat people, she said. During dinner, with the girls playing in the yard, this question of autonomy came up again, in a more philosophical way. I asked Sole-Smith what it meant to make less-than-optimal choices about personal health in the name of autonomy when others — children, family members, friends, a community — are dependent on you.
“Health is a resource and a privilege so many people don’t have access to,” Sole-Smith began. There are mothers who are substance users, older mothers, and mothers with congenital health conditions. No parent has an obligation to pursue good health, and to believe so “is fundamentally a very ableist perspective,” she said.
You can argue that the embedded rules aren’t controversial. I don’t judge people for having a cocktail. We all observe examples agreeable and contrary to what we think the rules are. We all like to let loose, or relax, or celebrate, or invoke some pathway of thinking that doesn’t punish a rule violation.
Yet, there are some basic obligations in life, right? You should try to bathe, if you can. You should support yourself with income, if you can. And, if you’re a parent, you should do everything in your power to raise healthy and happy kids, right?
It’s that last question that didn’t seem like it had an ambiguous answer until I read this emphasized snippet from the above quote:
No parent has an obligation to pursue good health, and to believe so “is fundamentally a very ableist perspective,” she said.
I’m not a contemporary vocabulary whiz. So, I looked up the definition of “ableist” with a simple Google Search:
Ableism is a set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be 'fixed' in one form or the other.
In other words, if I feel that I have an obligation to pursue good health, that’s devaluing and discriminating against other people? Did I just a question that touches on the core beliefs underlying Ableism?
Let’s not answer that question. Instead, I evaluated a different question after reading the quote: do I have an obligation (as a parent) to pursue good health?
Uh, yes. Am I allowed to make exceptions from time to time? Of course. Do I have an ableist perspective because I believe I have that obligation? No, I don’t think so. To reduce the effort to that sort of word seems downright ridiculous. Feel free to tell me what I’m missing in the comments.
Subjective Boundaries
The article profile caused lots of agreement and disagreement with Virginia Sole-Smith’s views. But those views reminded me that rules, boundaries, and violations are often subjective. What you think breaks a rule might not matter to me, or vice versa. Our definitions of the components of the rules also matter. I immediately thought of the No Vehicles In The Park game after finishing the profile.
Here are two responses from my last post in which readers answered all the questions and compared their responses to the broader game population:
Oh no 100% what kind of conformist dupe am I? The tank is the one that nearly got me. It’s a vehicle, operative or otherwise.
The tank is a vehicle of course. I suspect that comment’s author disliked some of his answers that veered towards subjective exceptions.
And:
52%. Tried to align my answers as closely to the definition of vehicle in the Oxford dictionary. I also deemed airspace above the park and ocean water bordering the park as not in the park.
For example, the graph below shows (I think) that 65% of people agree with me that the police car is a vehicle in the park. It violates the basic rule of the game. What’s more interesting is what the other 35% were thinking. Why isn’t the police car a vehicle in the park?
We all know the rough answer: it’s a special situation. The police car is an exception to the rule. A local park caretaker probably would not yell at a police officer for driving into their manicured park to stop or mitigate a crime. But, the caretaker should feel empowered to enforce the rules of the park, right?
If not, and it’s up to all of us to decide, what rules will we settle on using to keep the park clear of unwanted riff-raff? The thought of agreeing with or never finding the consensus has the hint of a collective action problem.
So, I’ll leave you with the question that is vexing me after dissecting the profile and my own thinking around rules, and definitions.
Exactly what rules and definitions are we allowed to care about?