We Can Fix Our Problems
As long as we see them as problems we share
Hi friends, I’m back. I know you probably didn’t think I went anywhere, but last week’s post was the first after I broke a 70-week streak of writing this newsletter. As any Wordle player knows, streaks are addictive but when you break them, it can be hard to get started again. Once I intentionally broke a long Wordle streak precisely because I felt like it had become a source of anxiety instead of joy. After a few days, I was able to start playing again. I will take the breaking of my publication streak as a sign that I need to take some pressure off myself, word production wise.
The other night, I emailed myself this message: “Any problem that a lot of people are having individually is a system problem.” I think the reason that I had this thought was that I overheard someone talking about a problem that I was having, and which I know other people are having. It’s a less articulate formulation of the idea that “systems are perfectly designed for their outcomes,” or “Every system is perfectly designed for the result it gets.” The problem at hand concerned an issue with a parent or a child, I can’t remember which.
But this isn’t a post about commiserating about our shared problems. It’s about naming the fact that a lot of our problems are all part of the same system. For our parents, it’s housing, medical, and eldercare issues. For our children, it’s education, socialization, and housing. Those are just some examples, obviously, but they are universal problems for us because we, as a society, have not solved for them.
This is the case even for issues which are beyond our comprehension. I wrote about this when I reviewed Stolen Focus in this post.
Andrea DooleyWe think that social media is a problem beyond our control to fix, and it is - individually. But as Johann Hari notes, the technology exists to handle it if we have the legislative will to enact the measures that curb its worst impacts.
It had not occurred to me that this same logic could apply to Artificial Intelligence. In this article (which is also a good primer on identifying fake photos), Sonja Drimmer points out that we have often trusted regulatory agencies to develop the expertise to manage problems which are beyond our personal capacity to solve. We can’t all do the research on drug and food safety, so we trust the FDA to do it, for example. They don’t always get it right, of course, but on balance, they know much more about this topic than we do, and even their flawed systems are better than a politicized and corrupt model that leaves food and drugs unregulated. You trust me to implement my expertise, and I will trust you to implement your expertise, and we will let our peers judge that expertise, but ultimately, that’s how we solve problems together.
Until this year, the principle that we could and should defer to regulatory agencies to interpret and implement the laws passed by Congress was (mostly) the law. This was called Chevron deference or the Chevron doctrine by lawyers and again, was not something you had to worry about it because it (mostly) worked. I say “until this year” because the Supreme Court ended Chevron deference this year, essentially returning review of the technical interpretation of laws to the federal courts. Yes, those federal courts, the ones which have shown remarkably factless and inexpert views about women’s bodies, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, and student loan forgiveness, to name a few of the consensus issues that have been gutted recently.
I mention all this to remind you while the big show is Trump vs. Harris, Congress and the federal courts are also on the line this year. Yesterday was Voter Registration Day. Check yours, register if you aren’t, and then head over to Mobilize to volunteer for some phone or text banks, canvassing, or postcard campaigns.
Before I head off for my text banking shift with the DCCC, a couple more things. Yes, I am still a Ridwell skeptic. I appreciate all of your super smart comments. I’m a Bluesky user, and I like it. In fact, I just learned that I am user #893,381. How about them apples? You can find me there at adooley.bsky.social. Finally, I am heading off on another adventure and I promise to share lots of pictures and stories from the Kumano Kodo trail!
