And Then They Went Home

We often obey the memories of people we've never met, and doing so, when you really think about it, is a strange type of societal knowledge transfer and a key benefit of being human.

Don't stand there. Definitely DO NOT open this while the machine is running. Keep your hands inside. Slow down. This door must remain unlocked during business hours. That mushroom: big nope.

Behind a number of these instructions and standing orders is an unhappy story, or a very close and serious brush with an unhappy story. Pain, fire, a kid wandered somewhere a kid should definitely not be. After any of these things, people likely stood around with that steely-eyed, special clarity only ever available immediately after a disaster. And then they changed something.

Which, yeah, of course.

Generally the processing of a scary event into something protective is how we get better at staying alive.^[1]

I don't particularly want to live in a world where every generation is forced to independently rediscover why stairwells need railings, why highways need guardrails. When I step onto an airplane, I'm immediately reminded there are definitely some lessons where "trust us on this one" is perfectly acceptable. I trust you, air traffic control, please and thank you. Hope the WiFi works.

But, over time, as that event fades into days, months, years, there's something odd about what happens.

Fear dissipates as people get on with their lives. They go home and have lunch. Their memories get fuzzier in a human, ordinary way. What exactly happened? Was it before lunch? Was the worry machine (e.g., the rule or whatever) running yet? Eventually the story is edited down to one or two details somebody is confident about and the rest is up for permanent debate.

That stairway railing, those warning labels, they maintain exactly the same amount of alarm they had at the beginning. Compare that to the rule creators, who, over time, calm down. We can turn what once terrified us into dinner stories. Yet our structures, rules, and regulations built in response to our initial terror don't calm with us. They often stay indefinitely worried on our behalf. Events might disappear into the background, or disappear completely, while the reaction to those events becomes just a part of the scenery.^[2]

You stop seeing and questioning the railing, which is now just a peculiar group memory. You hold it.

Guardrails good at their jobs keep those cars from disappearing down the cliff the pioneers named Blood Gulch. You battle a bottle of Advil and its childproof cap (you are an adult), and maybe you realize the cap is good at the job it was given. Maybe not. Why even have this stupid, stupid cap?

The absence of disaster feels normal because that's what normal is, and normal days create a situation I like to think about all the time: the better a safeguard performs, there will be less evidence lying around that it was even needed in the first place.

Sometimes I get off a flight and laugh to myself on what I don't say to the crew telling me goodbye at the front of the plane: "Tremendous work today on all the midair collisions and crashes we avoided." Day to day, we mostly experience safety measures as slight inconveniences, tiny delays, ugly little railings. 'Sometimes it's just extra steps or things beeping at us (just needs new batteries).

There's a half-life on the long-term reputation of any given rule.

Eventually someone encounters the rule without encountering any of the fear that caused that rule to be instantiated like Mario, new to the level. Now all they can see is the cost. Door: closed. Bottle: tricky to open. Why am I fighting a bottle designed to also be a puzzle? And it can be hard, outside of our area of expertise, to fully reason from first principles or walk the entire idea from point A (problem) to Z (rule).

Why do I think about this so much? I believe this is basically behind most of the either/or debates we have. Strip politics to its studs, and isn't it mainly this? We have too many regulations! This should be regulated! Family dispute? This isn't how we do things around here! We should do things differently around here!

It's uncomfortable. It's a problem because we're often arguing about things when we haven't yet experienced the bad outcome; as an example, I intuitively get oven mitts and haven't ever put my hand directly on the stove burner. But I also know a rule can be obsolete because it is, and it can look obsolete because it worked.^[3]

Squint at a rule, really look at it, and a lot of the time you can't tell if you're staring at accumulated wisdom or lingering, residual fear. They can both look the same.

Blood Gulch once claimed a lot of cars. Or did it? Was someone just really worried it might? Either case can produce a guardrail. In both cases, you're driving by, slowly, not careening over the embankment.

The world we inherit is chock full of other people's conclusions, and quite little of the evidence that was front and center, to them, when they made that specific conclusion. Sometimes we're the beneficiary of an old fear handled exactly right. Sometimes we're still paying for unwarranted panic from 1963. Most of the time we don't know which; we don't have enough to call it one way or another.

I think a lot about the first person who discovered a certain kind of mushroom was poisonous. Was there a person? Or by that point, had enough mushrooms with red little dots made enough people sorry that we kind of just knew...big nope on that one.

Accumulated human knowledge usually gets to us a little scattershot, from people who had to deal with real problems right in front of them, or problems they thought might be there if they didn't do something.

Some of those people saved our lives, some were overreacting. Both sets left us the same instruction either way: don't do that.

And then they went home.