Burden of Knowledge

You said people were sort of frightened. Do you think 23andMe is scaring people to sell their product?

No. But I do think it relates to what psychologists call the burden of choice. If a doctor tells you that you have to make a decision about what to do about a very sick child, that choice becomes a burden in itself regardless of the results. You wake up every day wondering if you did the right thing. If the doctor says “here’s what I think you should do,” the doctor takes on the burden. In the 23andMe case, I think there’s similar thing happening but it’s a burden of knowledge. If you know even possible future illnesses based on genetics, are you already paying a price just by having that knowledge?

Dan Ariely on 23andMe. I agree with his general sentiment that it's hard to know what to do with the information the service shows you. The site provides no guidance on what to do to try to combat, say, a slightly elevated risk for colon cancer.

Branching off of this topic, the phrase “burden of knowledge” struck a chord for me. As a leader, one of your jobs is to make decisions for your team to take the burden of knowledge off of their shoulders, and one way to know when you're ready to move on up is when you feel the itch to be the one who takes on that burden when it comes to key decisions. The desire to be calling the shots isn't sufficient, but it is a requirement.

The impact of robots on the household corporation

As feminist economists have long pointed out, households are factories in function and corporations in identity. They are factories because they apply human labour and tools to convert inputs like groceries, nappies, houses, etc. into things worth having, like meals, children, homes, etc. They are corporations because they are unified economic units, separated from the individualistic competitive market that operates outside its walls. That is, the individuals who make up a household, like the employees of any firm, are supposed to work together as colleagues to advance the success and prosperity of the corporate 'family' as a whole, rather than to advance their own individual material interests as actors in a market would.

Organising production inside the household - outside of 'the market' - makes economic sense in many circumstances, which is also why we have business firms. Using the market comes with significant transaction costs associated with establishing trust and quality assurance between self-regarding strangers. For lots of household work - like washing the dinner dishes - the costs of contracting with someone else to do it are so high that even though you have much more productive things to do with your time you are still better off doing it yourself.

More significantly, in addition to minimising transaction costs, corporate structures permit positive efficiency gains from coöperation. In particular, many projects - child-rearing for example, or soccer matches - are most economically achieved by team-work. A team works together on many-hands problems and thereby achieves much more than the same number of individuals operating by and for themselves could. One can't organise team-work through the market because it is impossible to identify and directly reward the marginal contribution of each worker to the final outcome (whether producing thriving children or winning a soccer match). The corollary of this is that team-work requires not only suspending the individualistic 'homo economicus' logic of the market, but also inculcating an ethic of self-abnegating commitment in which individuals adopt the common good or goals of their 'family' as their own, and do not shirk the sacrifices it requires of them. There are different psychological routes to establishing this disposition to self-less coöperation, including viewing the work itself as sacred or feeling bound by honour not to let down one's co-workers. But in the family it is generally achieved through love.

From a long and fascinating piece speculating on the impact of robots on family by the always interesting Thomas Rodham Wells.

It strikes me that we already have some directional test cases in the potential impact of robots on the family household because many wealthy people already outsource a lot of their childcare and home care to other people. This article observes the same but foresees a surprising forecast for the impact of decreased reliance on each other:

The arrival of cheap robot-servants will revolutionise the political economy of households. We will be able to produce consumption goods like meals and child-care much more efficiently since the number of human hours involved will be much less. That means the standard 'team' of two adults will no longer be required. There may not seem anything fundamentally new about this, since machines have been replacing human labour inside the home for a 100 years (e.g. washing machines). Such technologies have supported the social emancipation of women: less household work to do means more opportunity for higher status paid external employment. But they have also permitted the rapidly increasing number of single adult households. It turns out that when people can afford not to be mutually dependent on another person, not to have to love another, fewer of us do so.

Look, I've seen Wall-E, I know how this ends, with all of us as obese hedonists, fattened on a life of overflowing leisure, all physical drudgery having been offloaded onto an army of robots.

I suspect we're still a ways off from feeling a massive overabundance of leisure due to robot labor, though. Until my Roomba figures out how to cook me dinner, wash the dishes, and do my laundry, I have enough chores to fortify my moral fiber and keep me loyal to the household corporation.

Hayao Miyazaki vs the Disney princesses

I spent Thanksgiving weekend at my parents' place, and my three year old niece Averie was also there, visiting from New York. She'd just visited Disneyland and spent nearly the entire Thanksgiving weekend wearing a Cinderella dress her parents purchased at the Magic Kingdom. She'd already seen the Disney animated movie and the Broadway adaption, and she conscripted me in re-enacting the scene in which Cinderella flees the ball just before midnight and leaves behind a single glass slipper about 48 times over the course of two days.

I'm always curious which stories from my childhood will endure for the next generation of kids, and based on a small sample size of my nieces, nephews, and friends' children, many of the Disney-owned properties are going to have a long shelf life: the Disney princesses, Marvel's superheroes, and the Star Wars mythology. The mechanics of how each of those three have survived the transition from one generation to the next is fascinating, a subject for another day.

[I suspect it reflects some blend of the power of narrative, merchandise, and distribution. For example, some fads from my childhood that seem to have run their course include Cabbage Patch Kids, Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones. Parents, correct me if I'm wrong and continue to haunt you to this day.]

What does interest me is the norms that each of those stories teaches my nieces and nephews. Kottke's post “How to talk to little girls” really struck me hard.

People do the "OMG, you're so cute!" thing with Minna all the time and it bugs the shit out of me. (I mean, I get it, she's cute. But come on.) It also completely shuts her down because she suddenly feels so self-conscious about herself and her appearance...which has led to her to be more cautious about new people and wary of cameras, the ultimate unblinking eye of cuteness collection. And this is a very chatty, social, and engaging kid we're talking about here, but the "you're so cute" conversation opener twists her up into a pretzel of self-consciousness that's so unlike her usual self.

I realized I was guilty of this, always telling my nieces how cute or pretty they are. On the flip side, I never really comment on my nephews' appearances. Is it any mystery why women grow up so conscious of their appearance? They've been taught and trained from an early age that society will judge them on their looks.

Our most powerful Disney princesses reinforce this, with beauty and love at first sight being the primary path to their salvation. Of course, many Disney stories are based on much older fairy tales, and in days of olde women's possible roles in society were much more limited. In that environment, the fairy tales encoded powerful messages for women about the dangers of society that awaited and how to navigate the dynamics.

In our more enlightened age, shouldn't we update our myths? This is not to say that I believe discrimination against women does not persist, or that women won't continue to be judged on their appearance in many settings. Perhaps, though, some of the iconic stories our nieces and daughters grow up with, pumped through the Disney marketing juggernaut, are not helping the cause.

Which brings me to Hayao Miyazaki. Contrast Disney princesses to the heroines of Hayao Miyazaki's movies and the differences are stark. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the themes of Miyazaki's movies:

  1. Good and evil
  2. Environmentalism
  3. Love
  4. Pacifism
  5. Flight
  6. Politics
  7. Feminism
  8. Children and childhood
  9. Water

Here are a few lines from this Wikipedia entry:

Most of Miyazaki's characters are dynamic, capable of change, and not easily caricatured into traditional good-evil dichotomies. Many menacing characters have redeeming features, and are not firmly defined as antagonists.

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Miyazaki has explained that the lack of clearly defined good and evil is because of his views of the 21st century as a complex time, where old norms no longer are true and need to be re-examined. Simple stereotypes cannot be used, even in children's films. Even though Miyazaki sometimes feels pessimistic about the world, he prefers to show children a positive world view instead.

●●●●●

Miyazaki's films often emphasize environmentalism and the Earth's fragility, especially in the context of critiquing development and pollution.

●●●●●

Many of Miyazaki's films deal with the power of love. In Miyazaki's films, the power of love is enough to break curses set upon people. In "Spirited Away", Kamajii tells Haku that Chihiro saved him from Zeniba's curse using the power of her love for him. In "Howl's Moving Castle" Sophie's confidence in herself and her love for Howl breaks the curse laid upon her by the Wicked Witch of the Waste. In Miyazaki's screenplay of "Whisper of the Heart" Shizuku's love for Seiji makes her follow her passion of writing and write the book while Seiji is away in Cremona, Italy. In "Ponyo", if Sousuke's love for Ponyo was true then the world would be saved.

●●●●●

Miyazaki has been called a feminist by Studio Ghibli President Toshio Suzuki, in reference to his attitude to female workers. This is evident in the all-female factories of Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke, as well as the matriarchal bath-house of Spirited Away. All of Miyazaki's films are populated by strong female protagonists that go against gender roles common in Japanese animation and fiction, from pirate captains to industrialists. Even in lighter films such as Kiki's Delivery Service, all of the leading characters are professional women such as artists (Ursula), bakers (Orsono), fashion-designers (Maki) and witches (Kiki and Kokiri). Miyazaki even goes more into depth with feminism when choosing which time period to write his stories in. For example, Miyazaki said that he chose to write Princess Mononoke during the Muromachi period because it "was a world in which chaos and change were the norm. It was a more fluid period, when there were no distinctions between peasants and a samurai, when women were bolder and freer".

One other I'll add here since I was commenting on Disney princess appearances earlier: in none of Miyazaki's movies do I recall a heroine's appearance factor into her fate. They don't wait around for princes or fairy godmothers to save them, either. Compare two images: one on the lessons taught by Disney's princesses versus this on the lessons taught by Miyazaki's heroines.

I paint with a broad brush here. Not all Disney heroines adhere to this format, and Pixar's recent Brave was one example of a movie with a female heroine, more complex lessons about right and wrong, and no prince.

But when you're considering animated movies to share with your daughters and nieces, or even your sons and nephews, this holiday season, consider putting a Hayao Miyazaki movie at the top of your shopping list.

Optimal blog post lengths

Related to my note the other day on the ideal length of various pieces of art, a post on Medium reveals that the optimal post length there (if your criteria is what length Medium post entices readers to spend the most time on it) is 7 minutes.

The post revealing this was, appropriately, 7 minutes in reading time.

[Somewhat related: I don't ever find myself glancing at the estimated time to read figure on any of Medium's posts. I'm not sure if it's because I am time insensitive or that my sense of time is so subjective that I just ignore the numbers, or if it's something else. Do others find reading time estimates for content useful?]