Tuesday 1 September 2020

Post No. 1,652 - Cros Posting: Thoughts on embracing uncertainty

This was originally posted on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2020/09/thoughts-on-embracing-uncertainty.html.

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One of the biggest problems with people inclined towards authoritarianism is their fear of chaos. However, many such people, in my experience, are perfectly comfortable with an unregulated or relatively unregulated housing / car market - they feel no need to see rigid controls on prices, and, in fact, would probably bitterly resent and resist that.

And yet, in other areas of life - around behaviour, social variation, they are doing the exact equivalent of what they would object to around cars and houses: attempting to impose rigid rules on behaviour and thinking - out of a misguide fear of what is often described by the words "uncertainty", "chaos" (which is a bad choice from a communication perspective, as it is so loaded with other meanings), and "change", all characteristics that are present in housing / car markets.

(There is a use for this parallel in engineering as well, with those clients who cannot understand how engineers can pick budget prices without a ground up calculation. Do those clients need a ground up calculation before they have an idea what a car p[rice is likely to be? Same problem, different context.)