The Tyranny of Small Decisions
Note: I had a few last-minute doctor’s visits pop onto my schedule today, interrupting my plans to write the top portion of this newsletter—so here’s a piece from my other project, Brain Lenses, about the importance of small decisions :)
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The “tragedy of the commons” refers to the uncomfortable reality that, often, when a collection of resources are shared, individuals acting in their own seeming self-interest will behave in ways that are contrary to the actual, overall good.
The archetypical example of this concept is a field that isn’t owned by any one cattle rancher, but which is instead shared by a number of neighboring ranchers.
If each rancher is careful in their use of this field, there is plenty to go around. But if any one rancher overexploits the field, allowing their cattle to eat all the grass instead of just some of the grass, a few will benefit from it while everyone else does not. And in extreme cases, the field may end up laying barren due to over-utilization: no one benefitting from it ever again because one or a few ranchers pushed it too far for their own, short-term enrichment.
This behavior is typically not the consequence of bad people doing bad things, but rather a short-sightedness that causes people to focus on the potential, near-term rewards of a specific behavior, rather than considering the long-term implications of their actions.
It’s also sometimes the result of a particular way of seeing the world.
Those who tend to be more individualistic are more prone to creating tragedies of the commons because they’re more likely to see such situations as being winner-take-all, and assuming that if they don’t utilize a public resource to the fullest extent, someone else will—leaving those who didn’t overexploit said resource as suckers who are now at a competitive disadvantage.
From this perspective, superficial logic says that one should try to benefit from such a resource to the fullest possible extent, while it’s available.
Long-term, of course, this approach is devastating to shared resources of all kinds, from the natural environment to publicly maintained assets like libraries and parks.
One person or a small group of people deciding that these resources are theirs to overexploit denies the benefits of those resources to everyone else. Yet, such people often feel justified in their overexploitation due to the aforementioned sense that if they don’t steal that book, if they don’t use up the grass in the field, someone else will.
An important, atomic component of many tragedy of the commons situations is what’s sometimes called the “tyranny of small decisions.”
Like the tragedy of the commons, this is a term that was coined in a piece of published writing, though in this case the example given was the loss of passenger railroad services in Ithaca, New York.
There wasn’t really a consistent, inexpensive way in or out of Ithaca, back in the day, other than the trains—which at their height provided reliable services year-round, during high- and low-seasons, regardless of weather conditions.
Local airline and bus companies flourished when conditions were good, and thus drained commuter funds from the railway half of each year. Folks returned to the trains when the weather was bad and the bus and airline tickets were more expensive, but otherwise left the trains half-empty, the tickets half-sold.
The passenger railway companies eventually went out of business, not because the service was no longer appreciated and used—part of the year, at least—but because millions of people made millions of small decisions, over time, that led to a sort of death by paper-cuts for the passenger railroad services in the region.
No single person’s one-off decision to hop on a plane instead of a train on a particular day was what killed Ithaca train services. It was the confluence of countless small decisions that eventually left people without a service that was actually quite good and useful and generally appreciated.
We can see this same tendency in other aspects of life: especially in terms of things that we want to achieve or support, but which we fail to successfully achieve or support because of tiny, seemingly insignificant decisions along the way.
We want to live healthier, fitter lives, but then a series of small choices throughout the day, which add up to a larger bulk of small choices throughout the month and year, aggregate into behaviors that keep us from achieving our goals.
We want to support local, independent businesses, but periodically we buy from massive, faceless online retailers: decisions that are more or less harmless in isolation, but which in aggregate help these multinational companies grow while local businesses stagnate, or even disappear.
The power of small choices that add up to big consequences is captured in the promotion of building intentional habits.
Carefully developed habits can help us aim our small decisions in the right direction— “right” defined in terms of the outcomes we want to see, long-term—more of the time.
Of course, bad habits—“bad” defined as leading toward outcomes we don’t want to see—can have the same, outsized impact.
Through this lens, it’s easier to see how convenient, rational-in-the-moment choices can, with time, lead to incredibly inconvenient, devastating, and irrational outcomes. The slow creep of human-amplified climate change is, unfortunately, a perfect example of this.
Perceived through the fish-eye lens of time and agglomerated behavior, even those of us who try very hard to act in accordance with our values can contribute more to hated problems than favored solutions, because of our socially and psychologically reinforced myopia toward the eventual consequences of our small, seemingly insignificant decisions.
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My parents are planning to move from Missouri to Seattle in the next year or two, and thus have been working through all the random stuff they’ve accumulated, digitizing a lot of it, and donating/chucking the rest. I’ve been going through a box of random “Colin things” they’ve collected over the years, and found a bunch of old photos. Here’s me making art at a young age (read: pouring sparkles onto a Christmas ornament).
Projects
This week on Brain Lenses I published an essay about The Stroop Effect, and a podcast episode about What You See Is All There Is.
Last week’s episode of Let’s Know Things was about the potential for a newfound EU Renaissance.
#BumblebeeColin.
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things:
Animated Book Covers(check out the earlier ones linked in the article, too)
Photos of Hong Kong in the 70s & 80s(beautiful and bustling)
Travel & Overhead Photography(some of my favorites from this genre)
My Three-Decades Alone on a Mountain(what a unique lifestyle)
Appearance of the Principate(realistic faces from Roman statues)
The Measure of Things(handy & interesting)
Boxes: A Field Guide(free book about everything related to boxes)
For more interesting things of this kind, pop on over to Curiosity Gadget.
Outro
Apologies for the lack of a new essay today: I’ve had a bunch of jaw/teeth weirdness going on for the past month-and-a-half, and I’m hoping to get it sorted out soon so I can eat/function normally again.
In the meantime, I’ve been chugging through my work and doing my best not to make jaw/tooth matters worse. Thankfully, I should know more soon, and I’m fortunate to be in pretty good health and spirits, otherwise.
Also: I managed to get my first haircut in six months last week, and I feel five pounds lighter from all the shag that was pruned from my head. The way things are going, though, it may have been smarter to just go with a bowl-cut like I had in the photos above—easier to maintain from lockdown, and, obviously, permanently stylish.
How’re things going in your world? Any recent haircuts or other strange milestones? Keeping your spirits up, or feeling a little down? Any shifts to your current norms on the horizon, or staying the course for the time being?
Send me an email and drop some knowledge.
I respond to every message I get, and if you’re feeling up to it, consider sharing something about how life has been for you lately; I may publish it (with your permission) in a future newsletter.
You can reach me at: colin@exilelifestyle.com
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