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  • I thought you'd enjoy a thought I've been having about some particular tools.

  • In this case, knives, statistics, and files.

  • I remember very distinctly the first time I was allowed a pocket knife.

  • My older brothers had been whittling for years, and knowing my parents it's likely that I

  • had to come of some arbitrary age and then pass some sort of pocket knife test before

  • I was allowed to join them in knife ownership.

  • So I was very motivated to learn the rules of proper pocket knife usage, but I remember

  • having some internal angst over one rule: always cut away from yourself.

  • I understood the reasoning behind that rule.

  • Your self is towards yourself, so if you cut in that direction there's a risk of cutting

  • yourself.

  • I was familiar with many safety rules of that form: "do a thing always to avoid something

  • bad that might happen sometimes."

  • Humans have been using knives for millions of years.

  • Statistics, on the other hand, is only a few hundred years old, maybe a few thousand if

  • you count the most basic concepts of probability, and risk analysis is very recent.

  • So for a long time, doing something always to avoid a bad sometimes was a good heuristic.

  • In fact, humans will go so far out of their way to do things always to avoid sometimes

  • that we have a long history of superstitions and obsessive habits.

  • We lived in a dangerous world, and before the discovery of the mathematics that would

  • help us asses risk, that was the best we had.

  • So we learn rules, repeat them, and are expected to follow them, regardless of whether or not

  • we know that the statistics justify the rule.

  • A file, on the other hand, is a tool that only works when you file away from yourself,

  • because of the way it's designed, with tiny saw-like teeth.

  • "Always cut away from yourself" isn't just a rule you should follow, it's a rule you

  • have to follow, or the file doesn't work, and you hurt not yourself, but the file, which

  • is somehow more convincing.

  • Whether it's better to design our tools with these rules already inside them, I don't know,

  • but it's something I think about a lot.

  • My first knife was a small red Swiss Army knife, and I could not help but think that

  • it was worth the risk of maybe cutting myself if only I could whittle in whichever direction

  • I pleased.

  • Each individual cut was so important to my work, and each individual cut had such low

  • risk of going wrong.

  • And what did I care, if I cut my finger a little with my tiny pocket knife in service

  • of my art?

  • Cuts heal, but my work, my beautiful clumsily-whittled pointy sticks are forever!

  • A risk/reward or cost/benefit calculation looks at the relationship between the chance

  • of something bad happening and the chance of something good happening, like the chance

  • of cutting yourself vs the benefit of knife direction freedom.

  • The tricky part is that in order to make this calculation you need to have the risk stats

  • and be able to put values on those good and bad things.

  • To me, a cut is just a cut, like any other cut.

  • But to my parents, a cut I get from a pocket knife they gave to me is fundamentally different

  • than a cut I get falling on the sidewalk.

  • There's extra responsibility and social cost to them, while I'm the only one who gets the

  • benefit of multidirectional knife freedom, so the real risk is that they'd take my

  • knife away.

  • It's really hard to reconcile differences in how much we value the things we value.

  • When parents value their kids' safety more than their kids do, or when we value the things

  • and people we know over those we don't, or when we value our now more than people a century

  • ago valued their future.

  • Still, I wanted my knife, and so I went along with this rule I knew my parents cared about,

  • Always cut away from yourself, at least when they were watching.

  • But unlike tests in school, where the "Right answers" you repeat might take 10 years to

  • become relevant to your actual life, the rule "always cut away from yourself" became practical

  • almost immediately when I cut towards myself and cut my thumb.

  • It was a very tiny cut, but suddenly it seemed like always cutting away from myself was just

  • a really easy rule to follow so why not just do it.

  • The freedom of being able to cut in whatever direction I want, the freedom of riding a

  • bike without a helmet or of not wearing a seat belt, can seem so valuable when you don't

  • have any experience with the down sides and doesn't know anyone who has.

  • It's not uncommon to hear stories of people who would always ignore a safety rule until

  • something went wrong, and then suddenly the equation changes.

  • Getting a concussion from not wearing a helmet doesn't change the overall risk, but it does

  • make you more likely to wear a helmet in the future.

  • Not just because you perceive the risk as being greater, but because suddenly it seems

  • stupid to value some mysterious intangible cool-factor that you used to think magically

  • floated around your helmet-less head.

  • We have the mathematical tools to deal with these kind of things when we look at statistics

  • in aggregate and translate to some sort of monetary cost associated with insurance or

  • something.

  • But to individuals these variables are much more variable.

  • It gets so much easier when we can just get rid of one of these fuzzy variables, change

  • it from a probability to a simple 0 or 1, always or never, nothing or everything.

  • It doesn't matter the risk of cutting towards yourself because cutting away costs you nothing.

  • And when we or someone we love do something important that comes with a very high risk,

  • the easiest way to justify those actions is by telling ourselves it's worth everything.

  • The math of this equation pushes our different values to extremes.

  • And it goes beyond physical harm.

  • How many people have stubbornly used some non-PC word or phrase out of the allure of

  • Freedom of Speech and Expression until they find out that someone they care about has

  • been hurt by it, and suddenly it just seems really easy to not say that particular word.

  • Or the opposite case, where someone stays attached to the simplified rule ofnever

  • use that wordeven in cases where the benefit outweighs the harm, just as a good whittler

  • does sometimes cut towards themselves for the sake of their art.

  • Of course, there's infinite complexities missing from these equations, such as that small mistakes

  • are worth making as long as we learn from them, which makes them not mistakes at all.

  • So as much as I like the aesthetic of the file, I wouldn't want the world to only have

  • single-purpose tools with built-in rules that prevent them from telling us anything about

  • the world around them.

I thought you'd enjoy a thought I've been having about some particular tools.

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