Mere days ago, I was approached at work by two former students. I’ll call one Karim, although that’s not his real name. At the end of this post, you’ll understand why I don’t give his real name. He’ll still know I’m referring to him when he reads this.
Karim is very bright and engaged, has a few undergrad degrees under his belt and is finishing a Masters degree from a UK university, is highly skilled in IT, and has a wicked sense of humour. When he touched on a familiar topic, I told him I would send him a link to a post I wrote a few weeks ago in this blog, simply to show him I agreed with him as demonstrated by my writing about it. That’s when the mockery commenced.
Karim smiled, “What’s a blog?” His friend raised an eyebrow in agreement. He followed up with, “What’s a blog? I don’t speak ancient.” It was still funny no matter that I was the target.
Admittedly, I am somewhat maladroit at IT. If you’re not familiar with the term you can Google it – no need to flip through a dictionary, whatever that is. I’m only starting to get into social media, mostly to link up with this site. Exhibit A of for me being IT inept: I said to them, “Hey, not every point can be made in under 144 characters.”
“It’s 140 characters”, I was quickly corrected. I know, I’m hideous.
I have no issue with social media, Twitter included. According to Twitter, all but one of the of the top six people, in terms of who has the most followers, is a musical entertainer; Barack Obama is in third place. Entertainment and quick bits have their place in society, albeit not everywhere all the time. Moreover, Twitter allows users to attach links, which could be a pic of someone’s belly button or a lengthy article or video or anything else on the Internet. So, although Twitter posts are necessarily short on content, tweeters can draw some followers into all sorts of detailed content if they choose to.
I thought I’d give it a try, making point or two in less than 140 characters. Pushing myself toward brevity can’t hurt. I’ve noticed that some people launch multiple tweets to get a point across, folks like Donald Trump, for example. I’ll do that below. I’ll do three bits of < 140 characters. However, if I never again do anything Trump does, that’ll be OK. So here goes.
Understanding requires details – words and/or #s. Sound bites sell & stick; are believed & repeated. Same with rumours, guesses, biases, BS. #QuickCan=BS
Quick+easy CAN = fun. Can also = BS. Facts+understanding those DOES = truth. Truth rarely quick or easy. Over to you (OTY), folks. #QuickCan=BS
BTW Karim is a good guy, often smart, always funny. This time, also a wanker. LOL. OTY K. #QuickCan=BS #KarimIsAWanker
On CNN’s GPS (Global Public Square), Fareed Zakaria recently hosted a segment, “How to Build the Perfect Team”. The lessons offered by the segment’s two contributors are applicable far beyond the business context they focused on. Moreover, I believe they also showed the value of old ideas being melded with, and not always replaced by, new ideas.
The topics of management and leadership have, for many years, been very much in vogue. As Zakaria noted, the volume of management books on the market would fill many shelves. I agree.
For the last two years, I have been part of a book club called The L School, which focuses on leadership. I was recruited by a former subordinate whose career has since soared through a combination of study (undergraduate and Masters degrees), working on special projects on innovation, and participating in leadership conferences such as one run by Canada’s Governor General; none of that success is due to me. I joined the group to support her yet I also benefit from that participation.
A trend I’ve noticed in that club and elsewhere is that some readers tend to focus on the last book they read, to the exclusion of previous ones, and then view the world through whatever lens that book promotes. For instance, if the last book you read was about how a person’s hair colour determines their political leanings, you might view everyone through that lens whether applicable or not. You might notice instances where red heads were conservative and ignore instances where they were not. Never trust a ginger (I’m kidding, cousin Loretta).
In part, this is how confirmation bias emerges, when events and people are viewed through particular lens or viewpoint instead of more broadly. Yet multiple viewpoints, lenses, and books may offer value long after we have moved on.
A case in point: the second book the leadership book club read was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, which I enjoyed and which dovetails with lots of other principles I’ve learned, through reading about neuroplasticity, for instance. One member of The L School seemed to forget its contents in later discussions. When I tried to bring attention back to a point from that book, she suggested that we had moved on and I should too. That’s unfortunate but common.
A more public example of my point, that older ideas and the people who venture them may still have merit, was illustrated in the GPS segment. One of the two contributors was Julia Rozovsky, People Analytics Manager for Google. She spoke of Google’s efforts to empirically determine what makes a perfect team. That mammoth effort by a mammoth corporate player in innovation was dubbed Project Aristotle.
Why, you might wonder, would a global leader in innovation name their project after man whose life predated the modern world, computers, cars, can openers and, well, cans? As Rozovsky explained, Aristotle is credited with observing that “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” (I believe it was actually Euclid who wrote “The whole is greater than the part” in Elements around 300 BCE, but I’m a big fan of Aristotle’s work too).
We often see teams become champions despite not having the most superstars, or sometimes any superstars. Quite often, the most entertaining bands are not the ones with the top guitarist, drummer and so on but the ones that collectively work best together. Ditto for governments, companies, and so on.
Sure, the Steph Curry is a basketball phenomenon and the other players on his Golden State Warriors are talented too, but the achievements of that team thus far have transcended the sum of its parts. The same goes for the Foo Fighters today or Earth, Wind & Fire in years past. They have (or had) some famous and very skilled musicians and some who were less-well known although still talented, but collectively they rock, literally in the Foo Fighters’ case.
Perhaps, and I’m only speculating here, other reasons for Google’s shout out to Aristotle were these: Although Google’s existence depends on technology it depends much more on people, who develop and find new ways to use it. And, software design is ultimately rooted in logic, which equally applies to numbers and ideas. Aristotle is one of three men in ancient Greece largely credited with bringing logic to ideas.
As Rozovsky explained, the best team is not always the one with the most brain power or the one that is most earnest and disciplined in their work ethic. It’s the one wherein everyone feels they can bring an idea to the table, wherein everyone can contribute how they best can, wherein everyone has some fun and feels safe, and wherein the focus of everyone in the team is on the process and results, not on what one or two people can gain from the team.
Enter Pulitzer-prize winning author Charles Duhigg, the other contributor to Zakaria’s CNN discussion. In Smarter, Faster, Better, Duhigg examined what makes people more productive and effective. He won a Pulitzer for the above-mentioned The Power of Habit. At the core of both books is the human mind and how it can make a person better in many ways. Those principles transfer seamlessly to groups of people if they are arrayed in a way that promotes or enables the best collective thinking and, by extension, the best actions.
On GPS, Duhigg offered as an example the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which has been entertaining audiences since 1975 with an ever-evolving cast. As Duhigg explained, creator (and executive producer) Lorne Michaels requires every member to contribute no matter how silly or odd or off-base they might believe their idea is. That doesn’t mean every idea someone spits out makes it to the stage. Still, many do in one form or another, or they morph into other ideas, or they are truly awful and discarded after open, critical discussion. Consider this clip from SNL:
Whoever thought that skit up, I doubt that person was afraid of ridicule or bullying or being criticized for stepping outside perceived boundaries. Not every cast or season in the vast SNL catalogue is equally funny. Nonetheless, the process of how they do what they do seems to go far beyond any one person or cast. The process seems to be what makes the SNL teams generally great.
My point, arguably Arstotle’s and Rozovsky’s and Duhigg’s point, is that the process of how we think, individually and collectively, may be the greatest determining factor in how well we do what we do. If you’ve read my book on BS or some of my posts, you will know I am focused above all on thought processes. With that in mind, consider the description of Duhigg’s Smarter, Faster, Better, in part, as provided on Amazon: “…explores the science of productivity, and why, in today’s world, managing how you think – rather than what you think – can transform your life (emphasis in original).”
How to think has always mattered. In Aristotle’s world and throughout history, how people thought determined what they thought as well as what happened as a result of that.
Consider er these beliefs: “Black people are inferior to white people”; “a large zeppelin filled with highly-flammable hydrogen gas flying through the air, which is filled with static electricity, will work out fine”; and “this new AIDS thing is just a scourge on gay men, so the rest of us will be fine with no precautions required”. These all turned out to be very bad ideas. A few hundred people suffered in the case of the (hydrogen-filled) Hindenburg igniting in mid air. Millions suffered (and some do now) with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, gay and straight alike. Millions, arguably hundreds of millions, suffered through racism and the African slavery it enabled, and obviously some still suffer today due to racism.
The process by which people and groups of them think seems to work smarter and better, if not always faster, when it is critical. As I pointed out in a previous post (Calls for Justice and Truth), a vital component in finding truth or justice is conscious acceptance that what you believe right now may be untrue, a little or a lot or totally. That realization is part of being self-reflective, functionally critical, and less inclined toward all manner of bias. This mode of thinking is by no means common. But it is possible for individuals and for groups of them.
I said above that logic applies equally to numbers as to ideas. Sir Isaac Netwon’s Third Law of Physics is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the same way, Johann Gottlieb Fichte first explained the process by which ideas evolve. He dubbed this thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (TAS). A thesis is an initial proposition. An antithesis is a partial or whole contradiction of the first proposition. Synthesis is the process by which common truths and value are identified in the previous arguments to form a newer proposition (a synthesis is the result of that process).
Example: (T) Everyone should financially fend for themselves. It’s not my job to look after everyone. (A) We’re not animals in the forest. The state should look after everyone from the cradle to the grave no matter what. (S) People have been shown for many centuries that they will work harder when they stand to gain from that work. Still, luck and circumstances play a part in financial success too. It is inhumane to let a sick person perish, a child miss out on an education, or a family starve because their abilities, luck, circumstances, or all of those left them unable to look after those things. Therefore, some people need and deserve help.
That synthesis is the foundation of public healthcare, public education, and the welfare system, to name just three common elements in the modern democracies. For another example of TAS, look at the adversarial court system and, ideally, the investigations which precede someone being put into that court system.
Investigations usually head in one direction as determined by the evidence. However, thorough investigations also assess the reliability of the evidence, look for alternative interpretations of it, and avoid tunnel vision, which is a form of confirmation bias.
So, whether the context is software design, product promotion, writing the next episode of a show, or investigating a serious crime, how good the team is seems to be determined by how open team members are to each other’s ideas, and how effectively they are at thrashing them out. Where ideas are thrashed about, teams seem to thrive. Where the people posing the ideas are thrashed about, those people stop offering ideas. Missed ideas could otherwise spawn the next great subroutine, a clever commercial, an hilarious comedy sketch, or a suspicion that a certain witness might be holding something relevant back.
Another book The L School read early on was Edward DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats. DeBono is perhaps best known for coining (and trademarking) the term “lateral thinking”. With Six Thinking Hats, DeBono encouraged team members to assume different roles, to wear different hats, such as the person who looks for why something shouldn’t be done, or how precisely it can be done and what it is required for that. In that way, negative feedback and wild suggestions and logistical questions aren’t necessarily attributed to individual team members, which can leave lasting interpersonal problems. Instead, different roles are played by different people, sometimes chosen by a leader and other times by the group itself. That book wasn’t popular within our group but, again, I thought it had some value. In my view, that value increases somewhat in light of what I heard from Rozovsky and Duhigg.
In his Forbes article, How Do We Avoid The Problem Of Too Much Focus?, James Heskett highlighted a couple of books relevant here. One is Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think, the topic of which is self-explanatory. Another is Max Bazerman’s The Power of Noticing, whichconcerns how leaders think and where some flaws exist. Despite the differing contexts, both discuss how bad outcomes can come from too much focus, and how outside possibilities, ideas, or information can be ignored.
Groopman advised his readers to ask, “What else could it be?” as a means of interrupting the diagnostic focus a particular physician may be caught up in, albeit with the best of intentions. And, as Heskett wrote, Bazerman “…concludes that excessive focus, among other things, is one of the reasons leaders fail to notice important facts relevant to their decisions.”
Critical thought, in one’s own mind and in group settings, seems a logical means of getting smarter and better at all sorts of things we do. Each piece of software is a specifically-arranged collection of subroutines that are often coded by various contributors. Space craft, air planes, and cars are collective efforts by many teams and subcontractors. So is your house or apartment. So are the best practices of how we think. Those practices have evolved for over 24 centuries so there might be a thing or three to learn from that, for those truly interested in truth finding, collaborative discussions, and clearly-logical decision making. Many smart people in today’s world are learning that. Many are not.
I’m fine if you don’t want to take my word it. Aristotle, Newton, Fichte, Rozovsky, Duhigg, Heskett, Groopman, and Bazerman, some in different times and in different contexts, seem to point in the same general direction. Of course, I could be wrong. That’s easy to say without actually asking some of these folks. So I’m asking.
What do you believe about the value of knocking ideas around between people without knocking around the people offering those ideas?
I’m about to take a departure from my usual ways. I’m about to throw untold numbers of people under the proverbial bus, one with a big “Sick Days” sign on it. Stay tuned.
A few colleagues recently said they were surprised, after reading a post on this blog, that I’m not more aggressive or strong in my condemnation of people I disagree with on one issue or another. That’s a fair observation. There’s a reason why I generally don’t lose it on such people.
If I don’t verifiably know a person or group is dead wrong on an issue, I try to exercise charity in critical thinking terms. I give people the benefit of the doubt. If they are wrong, I assume they are mistaken instead calling them liars, unless I can prove they lied. If they say something ambiguously, I assume they meant the best possible interpretation of what they said. I’m not charitable; the process of reasoning is. In my view, not as much charity is due to those who I’m about to toss under the bus.
In a March 29, 2016 story, the Globe and Mail reported that teachers’ sick days are costing Ontario school boards nearly $1-billion annually. As reported there and elsewhere, in 2012 the Ontario government reduced sick days for teachers from 20 to 11 and ended their ability to bank unused sick days. Teachers could previously cash-out a proportion of their unused sick bank when they retired.
Bankable sick days were seen by many legislators, pundits, and citizens as an entitlement virtually never seen in the private sector. True. Many other public sectors previously enjoyed bankable sick days and those are rapidly decreasing as new contracts come to those sectors. The main financial argument against sick banks is that allowing employees to bank unused sick days leaves a significant fiscal liability on taxpayers, even if those pay-outs are capped. True again. Teachers and a growing number of workers in other public sectors are being granted a maximum number of sick days per year, and unused sick days are not carried over, a system often dubbed use-it-or-lose-it. Governments, pundits and others point out that this is how the private sector deals with illness. Yet again, true.
I should point out that although I teach full time I am not in any teachers’ union, and no family member is either; I was unaffected by the changes. I have friends who are teachers and I respect the profession greatly but I have to look at this through the view of a taxpayer. That affects me. So here’s where someone slips under the bus.
The government and school boards were foolish in doing away with bankable sick days. That’s right, my view is that the government and school boards were wrong, not the teachers.
The Globe and Mail report, and others, indicates that government efforts to reduce costs through ending sick banks backfired, badly. Worse still, that backfire was easily predictable with even a cursory view to economics. Surely economics should factor into economic decisions.
As reported, teachers previously took less than their allotted sick time but now take almost exactly what they are allowed. They apparently use it before they lose it. When they use it, school boards must pay supply teachers to fill in for the absent ones while they also pay the absent ones. Before you start judging teachers on the morality of taking sick days when they may not always be sick, and that’s not easily proven, let’s look at why this government move was doomed to fail. It has little to do with morals and everything to do with moral sentiments.
Although many people believe economics is about money it is much more about people and what makes us tick. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner wrote in Freakonomics, “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”
Adam Smith first identified how it works, how we work. Smith is widely considered the father of political economy and has been studied by many for centuries. Sadly, not everyone who should have studied him has, and some missed his points if they did. As economist Jonathan Wright wrote (The Treatment of Smith’s Invisible Hand), “Human history is littered with failed attempts” to ignore Smith’s principles and advice. So what were his principles and advice?
In his 1759 book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith provided the first principle that applies in the sick-bank debate: incentives make us tick. He outlined the three main incentives people respond to: selfish, social, and anti-social. Selfish incentives are good for you and your family (money, pleasure, fame, etc.). Social incentives are good for other people and society. Anti-social incentives are negative effects which you don’t want to suffer by doing wrong (financial loss, jail, becoming a social outcast, etc.). Modern economists call these financial, moral, and social but I stick to the original terms here for clarity. As Levitt and Dubner explained, some people refrain from stealing because getting caught is costly in many potential ways, some refrain because they are morally repulsed by stealing, and some refrain because they don’t want to be seen as a thief and be treated like one. Economists have identified other incentives, one also relevant here: the herd mentality, whereby people want to feel in line with their peers.
Some people do bad things anyway. Some people do bad things solely for their own benefit or enjoyment (think thieves and serial killers), and some go along with the crowd (think tax evaders and rioting looters). Yet most of us are naturally inclined toward a rough balance of incentives provided we were not raised by wolves. Arguably, even wolves display social behaviour, and they definitely display a herd mentality in that they operate in packs .
In his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained how certain outcomes can occur even when unintended, even when no incentive is triggered. He called this The Invisible Hand. For example, even if baker opens a bakery solely to make money, his bakery benefits consumers who buy his products, other merchants from whom he buys supplies, and whoever benefits from those suppliers making money and buying from others. If another baker opens in the same area, the first one needs to lower his prices, increase his quality, or both if he wants to survive or thrive in the business, yet that too benefits others.
Smith also gave some warnings. One is that government regulations are needed to curb selfish merchants if natural market forces don’t do that, and another that creating any system which ignores incentives and human nature is foolish. An example of both warnings not being followed: Imperial Russia ignored the needs of her poverty-stricken people in lieu of the Tsar and aristocracy, and the Soviet Union ignored human nature by expecting everyone to put the state before any and all personal goals. Both governments eventually collapsed.
Smith’s invisible hand arguably spawned the theory of unintended consequences. As French economist Frederic Bastiat explained that in 1850 (What is Seen and What is Unseen), “…the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” Incentives, the invisible hand, and looking for unforeseen consequences have been known for many generations. Yet, that knowledge is clearly not universal.
Teachers are human and inclined by human nature to respond to incentives. So let’s look at the sick-bank and use-it-or-lose-it systems through the perspective of human nature.
We all have days when we feel like crap to one degree or another. With sick banks accruing and eventually paying them, many teachers likely dragged themselves into work (selfish incentive). That helped colleagues and students who needed them in the classroom (social incentive). It was seen as admirable to drag yourself into work if you were not too ill, not to mention financially prudent (anti-social incentive). And, most colleagues also sucked it up if they were a bit under the weather so individual teachers were apt to follow suit (herd mentality incentive).
With perishable sick days, a teacher feeling under the weather has no selfish incentive to crawl into the classroom, especially if that classroom is filled with periodic petri dishes dressed like students. Taking a sick day provides supply teachers (peers) more work and pay, it helps the class by not bringing more sickness there, it sets a healthy example for peers to also take care of themselves, and it makes peers’ sick days less suspect when they book off sick. All these are social incentives. Since most teachers seem to take all their sick days, there is little prospect of standing out in the crowd and being targeted for (anti-social incentive) consequences. And since almost everyone else is doing it, it could be viewed as stupid, self-destructive and/or against the herd not to do so. Anyone who understood incentives could see this coming.
If you knew nothing of incentives, and Ontario teachers were the first ones to use up all their perishable sick days, perhaps the backfire response would be a surprise. The fact is, these teachers were not the first ones or close to it.
In a previous post, I told readers about Bill. He periodically harangues me about various conspiracies and tells me to wake up but, as I wrote in that post, he tries to help me on many fronts too. To my point, he alerted me to this sick bank issue with teachers and marvelled at how the government didn’t see that coming. I know that Bill did not previously know about incentive theory because I previously harangued him about it and he put me on ignore, which might have been fair on his part. Bill saw it coming because he was once a correctional officer who saw first-hand how peers used up their perishable sick days. They reportedly planned some of them well in advance to be sure their shifts were covered and that peers weren’t left in danger within the jails. It seems unlikely to me that they were the only public sector workers to do that.
The use of sick days in the public sector, if not who abused those, is easily accessed by those in power. I have no idea if legislators looked at those numbers or factored them into their decisions. The results suggest NO on both counts.
If you’re thinking, “These teachers and other public sector folks are scammers and need to be brought to heel”, don’t. First, how well or not anyone feels on a given day is relative. With no incentive to err on the side of healthy, the scales can tip pretty quickly toward sick. Second, some people may view perishable sick days as something to help their overall wellness. Avoiding a bad bug at work or spending a day with family arguably helps wellness. Third, cracking down on fake sickness requires investigation by supervisors. That requires administrators to do home visits that their schools can’t afford them to make (they are needed in their schools), accusatory interviews with teachers returning from sick days (causing stress, more days off or labour litigation), or hiring new staff to investigate teachers reporting off sick. And fourth, any attempts to target what could be legitimately sick people, given the already fragile relationship between school boards and teachers’ unions, could cause major litigation or labour disruptions. Most of those outcomes would raise costs even further.
From a taxpayers perspective, a strategy meant to spend less money has cost taxpayers more of it, and efforts to fix that problem could cost us even more. Sometimes it is better to live with the existing effects of your earlier blunders than to aggravate those with further blunders.
I’m not advocating a return to teachers’ bankable sick banks. It might not help anyway. Backfires have a way of not being reversible.
In Think Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner wrote of several reasons why some incentives or schemes, even by smart and well-meaning people, backfire so badly. Their second reason was that “It’s easy to envision you’d change the behavior of people who think just like you, but the people whose behavior you’re trying to change often don’t think like you and, therefore, don’t respond as you might expect.” Their third was that “…the very nature of incentives suggests that when a rule changes, behavior changes too although not necessarily…in the expected direction.”
The next time you marvel at how badly someone’s idea went wrong, think about how predictable that may have been, whether that someone was you or another person. Bernie MacDonald is a wise former colleague with a quiet, sharp sense of humour. When he sees bad results he rhetorically asks, “Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that plan?” It seems that a whole government and several school boards could have used Bernie’s wisdom if not also his humour.
Evidently, they didn’t have Bernie’s wisdom, didn’t have an historical understanding of economics and human nature, didn’t consider any information about how previous public sector groups responded to perishable sick days, didn’t examine the savings or costs of those responses, and didn’t understand that “sick” is a relative term that means different things to different people. Even if no one picked up a book by Smith, Bastiat, or Levitt and Dubner, it would have been nice if someone had picked up a dictionary.
Now the damage is done. Taxpayers and/or parents will pay the price. I have thrown a whole group of government members under the bus because of that. Nothing more to see here, folks. You might as well be on your way.
Perhaps as much as any time in recent memory, we are faced with divisions between groups of people. Rich versus poor. Rural versus urban. Black versus White. Christian versus Muslim. The list goes on. Nevertheless, many aspects of life, of individual people, transcend all those differences and more. A lot of those aspects are observable if you bother to see them. As charitable, hopeful, and open-minded as that may sound to you, that transcending is not always a good thing. Case in point: stupidity.
Most people probably presume they are relatively smart. Some of them are correct. Occasionally, though, some people do stupid things and thereafter chastise themselves. A man bets on a team that loses and then rips himself for ignoring steep odds he bet against. A woman curses herself and her throbbing head for having too many drinks last night. A teenager hates himself for misbehaving with a young lady the night before his long-time girlfriend dumps him for doing that. We all make mistakes but most of us believe those are occasional, fleeting, the exception to the rule and not our norm. Some of us shouldn’t believe that. If it is unfair or mean-spirited to say some people are stupid, it is at least objectively verifiable to say that many people show stupid.
There are many ways many of us show stupidity on a regular basis. “Stupid is as stupid does”, we once heard Tom Hanks say while playing the title character in Forrest Gump. I’m not immune to stupid but I try my best. For example, I consciously work at not driving while distracted. I wrote about that in my book on BS but I’m not the only one talking about this.
Media in Ontario recently reported that, according to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), distracted driving was the leading cause of traffic fatalities on the roads they patrol, for the third consecutive year and counting. Those roads include all major highways in Ontario and all roads in smaller centres and communities where they provide general policing. Excluding those roads the OPP doesn’t patrol, 69 people died in 2015 in collisions where distracted driving was a contributing factor. The roads they don’t patrol include every city road patrolled by municipal police agencies, cities like Ottawa, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Toronto and all the suburbs that surround those cities and share police services with them. That’s a big body count.
If that many deaths were attributed to shootings, an outcry would follow. Actually it does and rightfully so. Imagine if those shootings were predominantly committed by the victim’s themselves and not by suicide. That outcry would be deafening and again rightfully so. Yet a few mentions of this problem persist. Distracted driving causes people to die in numbers greater than impaired driving, speeding, non-use of seatbelts or other driving issues. Still, we hear about it and then we carry on. Many of us carry on with distracted driving. Many of us carry on showing stupid.
Of course, there are many actions that fall under distracted driving, such as grooming, eating, and smoking, all while operating a motor vehicle barreling down a road with other people doing the same thing. Yet most of us know the number one culprit among distractions. Ironically, smart phones are supposed to represent progress by making us more connected, more informed and, presumably, more smart. Apparently not.
This can’t be news to many people. Highways signs talk about it as do media reports, public service announcements by other means, and so on. Yet hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of times daily (millions if you go beyond Ontario’s borders) people act as if they don’t know. These are the folks most of us see holding a phone to their head or holding it in front of their face while yapping away. Ironically, again, anyone with a phone that can be used hands-free could use it without, well, their hands.
It also appears evident that many people do know it’s unlawful. Many drivers who text do so while keeping their cell out of the sight of people outside their car; often in their lap or otherwise down low out of sight. This is evident by how frequently these drivers look down in the direction of their crotch, often every few seconds. Of course, I can’t prove that phenomenon is because of cell phones and texting. The other plausible explanation is that they are staring at their crotch and/or doing something with said crotch. Since that too would be distracted driving, I’ll hope for the texting explanation if only because that indicates stupid instead of stupid and creepy.
Studies indicate that, in particular, texting while driving can decrease reaction times by up to 35% while impaired driving can reduce reactions by 12%. This isn’t to say that it’s better to drive impaired than distracted, any more than it’s better to run with scissors than a cocked revolver. It is to say that if you yap on your cell while driving, and particularly if you text while driving, you are no safer to yourself and other motorists than someone who is pissed to the gills.
Naturally, no one who does this particularly stupid act believes it will cause them to have a collision, let alone die or cause someone else to die. Yet every year for several years now, that happens. I suspect that few people would say their safe arrival is less important than a quick and often meaningless chat with whomever, yet their actions say precisely that. I also suspect that few would suggest they are so much better at driving than the rest of us, and that the laws aren’t meant for them, yet their actions suggest precisely that too.
I spoke to a police officer a few weeks back about the kinds of excuses he hears when he stops cell-yielding drivers. These are but a sample of the reactions he’s heard:
“It’s a business call.”
“I’m on my way home.”
“Someone call me.”
“Excuse me. (insert indignation here) I’m speaking to my mother.”
Here’s where the transcending of barriers comes in. That officer told me the four sample excuses came from a diverse group in terms of gender, age, and apparent race. My own observations also show diversity in that particular stupidity. I see cell use in fancy cars and junkers, by people of both genders and all racial groups I can imagine, by almost all ages although to a lesser extent among apparently elderly drivers, on high-speed highways and neighbourhood side streets. As with so many topics I discuss and opinions I have expressed, I invite you to challenge those; see for yourself and let me know if your observations prove me wrong. If nothing else, that will encourage you to keep your eyes up and on the road, if you don’t always do that now.
There are so many good ways we could break down barriers, way that aren’t stupid. Hopefully, you’re one of the smart ones, or at least you consciously think about this and decide to be one of the smart ones. Smart, especially through conscious thought, can also transcend barriers of all kinds.
So, if you believe you are immune to the effects of distraction; immune to the rule of law and why that law was created; crash-proof; or that need for your mommy-chats trump neurology, physics, traffic laws, and common sense; stop it. Join the legions from every identifiable group who stopped it or never did it in the first place.
If you don’t already, get a hands-free option if you must. Call home as you walk to the car instead of only once you start driving it. Get a life and stop risking yours for stupid reasons. Stop risking mine for stupid reasons too.
If you’re on the smart side of this issue already, thank you. You might need to start getting as pissed off at this issue as I get if you want to see it change, and no matter what group(s) you may identify with. How’s that for bridging barriers?
In The Full Scoop on BS, I briefly told readers about a friend, Steve Hicks, who founded a few amazing organizations and helped many people. I did so as a segue to one of the founding principles of his organizations, and maybe what most drives him:
Make a difference and make something happen.
No one person is expected to fix everything that is wrong in the world, nor should they be. However, as long as you strive to make something positive happen on some front, you will be making a difference.
Of course, not every issue is of equal import to every person, and some issues affect far fewer people than other issues do.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) is a horrible, debilitating, often-fatal disease that deserves attention but has the mixed blessing of affecting far fewer people than many other diseases. Thus, it draws less attention. Those factors affect what fundraisers call sexiness. Accordingly, more funding and research, by governments and the pharmaceutical industry, go to tackle “sexier” diseases that garner more public attention and potential customers.
Enter the ice bucket challenge, a simple challenge that was done by a few people. It went viral in 2014. Incidentally, Steve Hicks did that with a Zambini-load of snowy icy water (!!!) poured on him and a few workmates. That I did the challenge too is unremarkable. What is remarkable is how simple the idea was, and how easy it was is to make a difference on the issue: When challenged, withstand a few seconds of brrrr, challenge three other people to do the same, and donate $10 on-line to ALS. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch is the ice-bucketeer in the photo above, by the way.
The end result of that idea was an estimated $17 million going to ALS Canada with an additional $10 million being donated by Brain Canada. The US take for ALS was estimated at over $115 million.
On a different front, date rapes are similarly and literally far from sexy. Experts in a variety of fields suspect that only a small percentage of victims come forward, and when so called date-rape drugs are used, some victims don’t always know they have been victimized. Like ALS, this issue experiences the occasional radar blip but not much more.
Enter Undercover Colors, founded by four undergraduate students from North Carolina State University. Their idea was also simple and brilliant: nail polish that reacts to the most common date rape drugs, Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid), by changing colour. By wearing this nail polish, a young lady need only stir her drink with one finger and check if her nail has changed colour. If it has, she can call police and immediately avoid being drugged into victimization. This post explains the product and creators: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/26/students-develop-nail-polish-to-detect-date-rape-drugs.
It could be that neither at-risk kids nor ALS nor date rape drugs are on your daily radar. However, by referring a parent with a troubled teen to a good local program, by doing the charity challenge, or telling friends who have grown daughters about Undercover Colors, you too can make a difference, and maybe stop bad things from happening. If you seek to make a difference on more fronts, that will be okay too.
It doesn’t take much to make something positive happen. Give it a try if you’d like to prove me wrong.
