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Guess what? It doesn't matter what you think. Reality is always correct. For details, see Taylor's Eighth Law of Appropriate Engineering. OK, so you want to come check us out. Fine. First, though, we have to read you your rights, in the form of the ADL, the Awful Depressing Letter, the story of the collapse of our Ephratah section. You may have seen something like this before, in your family, school, business, or circle of friends. The italicized passages were penned by our own Long Distance Consulting Engineer, Dexter Taylor, who, by the way, is unconditionally not responsible for nothing at all nohow, and does not endorse any and all of the alleged goings-on at Adirondack Herbs and environs. SOME OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF COOPERATIVE WORK Why are we here? Some believe that cooperation is a more sensible way of living than competition, others can't afford their own farm and this is their next choice. Some want a setup that does not require them to dress up and travel to work five days a week, so that they may have extra time to devote to art or writing. Some of the good folks who have come here had already recognized the beauty and value of their own self. They feel that such noble and rare individuals as themselves deserve service. Their very own parents have betrayed them or have largely abdicated their duties, and the children, at an age of 18 to 48, are committed to find some fool to take over from Dad. In these days and age, good help is hard to find, and some of our visitors have had to face much difficulty and disappointment while on their quest for worthy servants. All too often the chosen, instead of embracing service , are disrespectful, ungrateful, and at times even rebellious. We hope and trust the seekers will be disappointed here as well, as soon as possible. Some of our visitors are not totally useless, they are aspiring gentlemen farmers. Their image of life at the farm is getting up at dawn for a stroll in the gardens. Later in the morning, after coffee, the idea is to put in an hour of labor in the fields, before retiring to a well-deserved rest. A gentleman farmer trusts that others will work to maintain his quality of life. Besides the parasitism problem, a real challenge is the control of personal conflict, between good folks who can't stand each other if they have to work together. But put some distance between them, and the hostility usually just evaporates. We have solved that problem by having more than one farm. Now folks who did not get along can still work together, but indirectly, thirty miles apart from each other. Some utopistic communities promise peace, joy, loving cooperation, equality, happiness. Here we start resigned to the fact that we are going to argue and have painfully boring meetings over issues of face and power. The territorial imperative tells us to protect and expand our sphere of control, be that the sandbox, the office, the backyard, the village, the nation, or the hemisphere. It results in conflict with friends, neighbors, or other countries. We can't escape it, but if we are realistic about it we will be able to handle it. Then there is the dog in the manger issue. It goes back to an ancient fable of Aesop, I believe. There is the donkey, he had a hard day at work and would like to munch on some hay. But there is this crabby old dog laying there in the manger: he growls and snaps at the poor donkey when he gets close and tries to eat. The dog wouldn't lose anything, even his bedding would not be disturbed, if he let the poor donkey have a bite to eat from the corner of the manger. But he is compulsively nasty. You see that amongst cats. You see it in the chicken coop: a hen keeps another one from eating even though she is not hungry and there is plenty of food. You see it in business: they throw away a crate full of rubber boots but they slash them first. It's the nasty bureaucrat's mentality: his purpose in life is to complicate people's lives five days a week. It's not a matter of power: you can increase your power by making things easier for the others or by making things harder. The dog remains the boss of the barn whether he lets the donkey eat or not, but in his mind power is associated with putting down the other animals. It's a pretty bad instinct we all have to guard against. Even in couples, all too often one of the two, seems to obtain satisfaction out of putting down the other . All humans are a little crazy. Have you ever had a very close long-term relationship with someone without noticing shocking ideas and behavior in him--to say nothing of his relatives? Yes, they are odd, but most minor lunacy is manageable, if there is a non-blaming, tolerant, authoritative mediator. Major lunacy instead will destroy families and civil society: we must try our best to avoid fast moving vehicles and people who are so crazy as to be really destructive. It's too bad that destructively crazy people can be very attractive and gifted. One of the mildest forms of lunacy we notice here is what was called "polar choler". It was observed amongst polar explorers, forced to live together in cramped quarters for months on end, without speaking with or seeing other humans. No one to dislike, despise, or blame except for our best friends, those on whom we depend for our immediate day to day survival. No matter, our mind makes us hate them. Every sound they make, every quirk or mannerism, is noticed and noted down. Observing it again creates rage in the observer. Frustration in society at large is usually directed at other drivers, co-workers, bosses and neighbors; it finds partial release in nasty gestures, grumbling, gossip, and complaining with friends, sisters, and parents. Five men in a tent with 100 miles wind blowing outside can't do much of the above. The result is rage. In milder forms it is noticeable in communities, particularly in wintertime. I have also noticed how much more likable my friends at the farm seem to be when I return from a long sales trip. A solution to this syndrome could be to have at each of our farms an empty cabin, always ready and reserved as a quick getaway refuge for folks from the other farms. Even better, buying a house in NYC or in Venice. Sometimes former city folks get really tired of snowy fields and need a quick charge, a couple of weeks back in the big city. At the other end of the madness continuum are the big diseases that need to be controlled with chemistry. There is a slow progression between sanity and insanity, with no definite border. It's a continuum. At one end you might have Albert Schweitzer, great musician, physician, and Nobel Prize winner, who dedicated his considerable abilities to help humanity, without having contempt for other forms of life. At the other end of the continuum you have the guy who ate his friends. Everybody else is in between. Paranoid personality disorder is in the middle of the continuum. Its sufferers see danger and enemies where there are none. It can degenerate into paranoia, which afflicts people who see themselves as the target of a widespread plot. If the patient who sees enemies is receiving messages from Up High--or from Down Low, from the Prince of Darkness himself-- then the condition is called paranoid schizophrenia. Unfortunately as humans we have a very strong instinctual tendency to believe those who tell us that we are in danger. We tend to choose paranoiacs and schizophrenics as political or religious leaders. The result is crisis, conflict, and war. Every community will have problems with paranoia. Too bad. Most successful intentional communities are religious and authoritarian. Non-authoritarian communities are economically less successful and less stable. They seem to suffer from constant bickering and appear to provide to their members less satisfaction than authoritarian religious communities. People who leave non-authoritarian communities complain about the presence of a privileged ruling clique which controls all decision-making and applies rules unevenly, even though theoretically there is democracy. They complain about group tyranny, manifested as privacy-invasive rules and regulations, and as uncodified social controls and demands. The alternatives seem to be Imperial Government and PDPA (Pushy Democracy of Perpetual Argument). Too bad. So maybe our human authoritarian instincts are too strong to overcome, but let's try anyway.What about a primordially soupy slippery slop of democracy and labor aristocracy? The majority would have great moral authority but those who do more would have more authority--and more corporation shares-- than those who work less. Serious disagreements can be solved by the device of expansion. If a strong minority disagrees, if they are good workers, and think they can do it better, we could buy a new farm and put them to the test. Their success or failure at the new farm decides the argument. If they work out well we keep them as friends and allies. If they fail, we'll have to pay the mortgage and fix the tractor they broke but we'll have avoided a destructive fight. Consensus has been proposes as an alternative, but we have heard of problems, one being that it gives spoiled, pushy people too much power. Example: everyone seems to like April, who wants to join the community. But Pushy May wants her out. "No consensus, no decision," says Pushy May. So April goes. Under majority rule this would not happen. Oh, by the way, did we mention that Pushy May was part of the ruling clique? Had she not been, her veto could have been ignored, or at least she would have been pressured to conform to majority will. This would not be a problem in the absence of pushy people, but pushy, overbearing people who make scenes and throw their weight around are as common as spoiled kids. Too bad. Having seen the way consensus works sometimes, another possible problem, is that the consensus reaching process may acquire sacramental value as the consensus facilitator turns into the high priest(ess) of the process. The meetings get longer, the process becomes more important than work or fun, and the priest's powers increase. If you have a solution for the above problems, we might reconsider our objections to consensus. Cooperation is much harder than a boss-employee relationship. Take some good self-confident folks, a dose of misplaced optimism, and the opportunityof working without a boss watching over you, and you got the recipe for the rapid collapse of civilization. After long and sometimes painful experience, it has occurred to me that the highest and most difficult art is that of self-command. The rare souls I've met who are good at commanding themselves seem to have neither a problem working without supervision nor a compulsive need to supervise others. Contrary and silly creatures that we humans are, we tend not to like such people as leaders, preferring those who strut a lot and talk a good game (see Bush, George W.) One of the most daunting tasks in a cooperative setup is that of dealing with stupid behavior. Everybody, myself most definitely included, does dumb stuff every day. The big problem is personal patriotism, where one thinks: "I could not have done something stupid because that would make me a jerk and I would lose face." We stop doing reality checks - - "Does it work or not? Did it work better before I fixed it?" The whole thing turns into an issue of face and we start protecting our mistakes like they were "our boys", sent off to fight some idiotic war in some far off distant land. All the engineers I respect the most have a habit of not only embracing, but loudly pointing out and labeling failures, especially (not to say exclusively) their own. To a right-minded engineer IMO, your failures are signposts in the wilderness along the trail you yourself have blazed. They're the markers on your personal learning curve; they're yours, dammit, you made them with your own hands! And if you aren't lucky enough to be the one who actually solves the overall problem, the next best thing you can do is connect all the dots of your failures and hand that map off the the next guy. Worthy people and Appropriate Engineers will respect you for it. This is where self-command comes in handy, because we all have egos, we're all ambitious, we all want to save the day -- but dammit, my ego has to obey *me* and not the other way around, otherwise that marriage just won't work and someone has to go. So you say you can cut glass, and we give you six window panes to cut down to size. You break the first three, then the fourth, and ... the fifth. "It's no problem, really, except that this glass is really poor quality." With confidence in you glazier's skills you attack the sixth pane. It cracks. Here we have the makings of the First Law of Appropriate Engineering: Atoms Are Dumb, But You Shouldn't Be In other words, when someone lets you manage atoms for them, you're accountable. If you think the atoms are smarter than you are, then we'll take you at your word, fire your dumb ass, and let the atoms manage themselves. So you say that you know how to install the new electric meter. Fine. Why should we doubt it? If you say you know how to do it you must know how to do it. Otherwise you wouldn't say it, right? Wrong. You get to work and tighten the first lug on an electric meter so tight it busts. You tighten the second one. It busts. You tighten the third. It busts. "Poor quality equipment." This gives us the Second Law of Appropriate Engineering: Chances Are, It's Your Fault 80% of all failures are pilot error. 10% of all failures are copilot error. The remaining 10% is split between equipment failure, bad luck, and acts of God. You should know your equipment; your luck is your own; and blaming God is blasphemy if you're religious and damn foolishness if you're an atheist. So it's your fault. So the brakes on the car seem stuck. No matter, they will loosen up, just drive it a bit. So you take off, one wheel dragging. You wear out the tire and cut a three-mile long groove in the payment with your wheel's rim. "Stupid car." So you are attaching the kitchen counter to the cabinet and want to use two-inch screws. Someone says, "Aren't those screws a bit too long?" "Nah, they will fit exactly, I've done this before." Sure enough, the tip of the screw breaks through the counter. "No problem, the next one will be at an angle. I really don't want to use shorter screws, it wouldn't be solid enough." When the job is done, six screws are sticking through the kitchen counter. "This is much better than having a weaker structure. I will hide the tips with some high quality glue." So you want to put up some sheetrock. Good. We show you the tricks. Main trick is not to let the screws stick out of the sheetrock. You feel it's O.K. if a few screws stick out a bit, only a bit. We explain that the screws should go slightly into the sheetrock. You disagree, and decide to hide the screws behind extra joint compound. Since your job is awful, you decide to cover up the sheetrock with wood, and use up most of our pine siding. So you want to lay down a coil of plastic pipe. You secure one end, and pull out the other end. It takes thirty seconds. Great work! It's almost all done! Now all we have to do is try to lay it flat on the ground, but it doesn't want to do it. Why? Because the pipe coil should have been rolled out like a wheel. What's wrong with the pipe not laying flat? You lose length, you trip over it, the water in the pipe gets hot in the sun instead of laying flat, shaded by the grass, and then it freezes at the first frost. It's sloppy work. So you say you know how to do wiring. Fine. Here is a coil of #12 and a box of plastic staples. If you pull out the wire instead of unrolling it, you don't know wiring. The wire has to lay flat and straight, it's not supposed to twist. If you do not have time to unroll the coil, we do not have the time to straighten the wire after you have twisted it, and we do not have the time to follow you around the farm to make sure you don't cause more damage. (I'm on a roll!) The Third Law: If You Did It Ugly, You Suck Now sometimes ugly is just necessary; if so, we will understand. The rest of the time, we'll just conclude that the Third Law holds. So you bought cookies with your gas money, and you take the car even though you don't have enough gas. On the way to the concert you run out of gas and the police call and ask us to come and bring a can of gas. You do not say, "I just don't know how I could have been so stupid as to leave without gas money." No," you say, striking a thoughtful pose, "Something very wrong the way this car guzzles down gasoline. We ought to junk it." So I tell you of a shortcut that would save you 20 miles on your way to Albany, along good fast country roads instead of the toll highway. But you will not try it. Why? "Oh, it's O.K., we always take the highway." Fourth Law: If You Can't Update Your Methods, You Might As Well Be A Rock Rocks are fine, but they usually take a bit longer than necessary to get things done. (They're aces when it comes to weighting things down, however. Here, have a seat.) So we tell you: "No need to hurry, some wood chips from that pile need to be placed on the path, but it's no big rush. No need to overload the wheelbarrow. No, it would not be very smart to put our 50 gallon plastic garbage can in the wheelbarrow and fill it with chips. The chips would need to be lifted higher to get into the can than into the wheelbarrow, it would take longer, and the center of gravity would be higher, and the load very unstable, a sure prescription for spillage." Well, well, here you come staggering along the path with the garbage can full of chips in the wheelbarrow, and sure enough you spill it, right in front of us. Minor detail, the $20 garbage can hits the ground and cracks. At that point we do not have to say a word because you know it was dumb to do it your way, unless you be in denial. Which brings us to the Fifth Law: We've All Been To The School Of Hard Knocks, But Only Fools Insist On Paying Tuition What defines a technology -- or a civilization -- is institutionalized knowledge. What makes institutionalized knowledge useful is the ability of humans to learn from other people's experiences. If you insist on learning exclusively from your own mistakes, that's fine with us: give us our tools back, sign this release form, and wait until we clear the area. So the house has a good simple water system that has never failed, but you want to make improvements. You put together a new complicated system that is not very energy efficient. The main problem, however, is that it floods the house about every 10 days. So it was a good try, but isn't it time to stop this flooding and reconsider? Of course not. It does not work, but you are pleased as punch with the new system. Why? Face. This is a juicy one because it gives us our Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Laws: #6: If It Doesn't Work, You Suck The above doesn't apply to prototypes, of course; you build those expressly so that you and your fellow Appropriate Engineers can *watch* them fail and take notes. But production systems have to work. No excuses. A production system that replaces an existing, working one must be _better_ than the one it replaces. If it's only as good, then the cost of your labor and the risk in the change itself means you incurred a net loss. If it's less good, then, as we've said, you suck. #7: Amateurs Solve Imaginary Problems, Professionals Solve Real Ones There are some exceptions; certainly we can think of some outstanding geniuses who have solved wholly imaginary problems and thereby added immeasurably to humankind's store of knowledge. As a matter of pure statistics, you're probably not one of them, so get over yourself and get to work on a real problem. #8: Reality Is Always Correct Is the basement flooded? Is this water system of your design and implementation? Is the answer to both questions "yes"? Then guess what? It doesn't matter what you think. For clarification, see Rule #6. Hey guys, let's not be so pighheaded. We all make mistakes, and I do stupid things at least three times a day. If we admit it and have a good laugh over it, we don't really lose face. All we lose is a good starting position in the grand contest of who is the biggest fool. Please remember that communities, businesses, and states die when our domination instincts become stronger than self-interest and collective survival instincts. Everyone, sooner or later, makes mistakes so incredible, that he appears to his co-workers to have slipped into temporary insanity. Doing the kind of stuff that makes mothers of 10 year olds scream. But we are grown people, competent people, who have proved to be able to do fine work. What do you know, one morning an excellent carpenter wakes up and decides to use flat steel roofing for siding, expecting that it will provide insulation(?!) and keep out the mice. For some unstated reason he doubts the mice will come in through the floor. Another fine carpenter becomes a famous inventor when he decides that a greenhouse must be insulated from the cold coming from the ground; to protect the plants he puts flat steel roofing on the ground and covers it with layers of old trash carpeting that he picked up from a dumpster. Another man, a very fine professional builder, decides to dig into the sand underneath a main bearing wall: it's a basement wall, built of uncemented stones. Another professional carpenter decides to strengthen weak old rafters in an old house, with new rafters that are six inches short of reaching the wall. Another professional man, arguing that foam is better insulation than fiberglass, sticks broken odd pieces of foam into a wall: you can see the outside through the cracks, but that minor detail does not register with him, and he believes that he has doubled the R-value of the wall. Another fine guy decides to add wet insulation to dry insulation before putting it into moisture-proof walls. Another competent guy rejects the idea that extra water makes concrete easier to handle but much weaker. A fine builder secures wooden siding with three-inch screws, and metal roofing with one-inch screws. Another one demands "waterproof cement" for a foundation built in a wet area. One of the authors of the above demands suffered from schizophrenia, the others were apparently sane, actually real cool people. It appears that irrespective of the level of knowledge or success that we achieve, there is a force that propels us toward self-destruction. The lunacy of the mistake is apparent to the carpenter's helpers, but never to the master carpenter. "I am the master buider here", he says. His friends are afraid of challenging him. Problem: if he gets away with minor lunacy today, tomorrow he might burn down the house, and the day after tomorrow he might invade Russia or Iraq. Here is a brief course in ancient AH history, to give you an idea about the kind of idiotic things that happen if there is no mediator available. Originally I did not offer any ownership shares in my only farm, just profit shares: it would have been pretty dumb to give away my home in Galway, including the right to kick me out, even to good friends. After I got the other farms, it was not such a dangerous step any more. So we kept growing, and we had here Anne, 20, Matthew, 21, their baby, May, 23, George, 25, and their little boy. Then there were Mike, 28, Moe, 42, and Matt, 69. All these people were pleasant and civilized, none were drunks or wife beaters. They all liked to work. Most had children in whose interest you would have expected them to work together. All of them were positive people who would be considered an asset in any organization. So Crazy Annie came to visit in Ephratah and dropped the baby on his head. So Anne and May said she had to go. Moe liked her, though, and was sorry to see her go. Most thoughtfully, they sent her from Ephratah to Mike and Matt in Galway without telling us how crazy she was. When we found out we bought her a bus ticket for Vermont. Anne and May were the best of friends. One morning, Anne told May that her own husband, Matthew, was a worthless fool, that she was better off without him. May agreed, Matthew is a worthless fool. Anne kicked out Matthew, sending him to us in Galway. Great, at least for the Galwayans: Matthew is a fine guy and a great person to work with. Three days later Anne changed her mind and asked Matthew to come back. May was not pleased at all, because "a decision has been made already." She said, "Matthew is a loser, I don't want him back." Anne said, "He is my man, I want him back. It's none of your business." May said, "Yes it is my business." May was upset because Matthew, very wisely, did not want to turn his tax refund money over to the Ephratian community pot, which had been instituted and was tightly controlled by May. Anne said, "I am leaving." May said, "You do what you have to do." Anne, Matthew and the baby took off for Syracuse. I got on the phone with them, and after 3 hours of conversation managed
to convince them that everyone except for May loves them and they should
come back. May was then very upset, but after 5 hours of conversation
with May I managed to convince her that we all needed Anne and Matthew.
Still, she was not happy at all. We told her that to kick people out
you need 80% of the votes, while in this case she was in the minority,
since everyone else loved Anne and Matthew. May intimated that if she
could not control things at the farm she would have to move. Anne and
Matthew came back, all the way from Syracuse. A couple of miles from
the farm Anne had an anxiety attack. It was a dark and stormy night,of
course, and Anne just could not face May: she told Matthew to turn around,
which he did. May decided that she wanted to live at a place where she
could not be overruled by a tyrannical majority. May and her husband
took off, poor Moe was left all alone in Ephratah and when Crazy Annie,
who was by now pregnant, called, he invited her to move in with him.
I told him that us Galwayans could not tell him what to do, but that
the lady was suffering from schizophrenia. He said, "What, it's
just a visit." I told him that we had no right to make any decisions
for him, of course he had the right of inviting guests, but that a crazy
person who denies being crazy usually destroys everything around her.
So she visited, and staid. Anne and Matthew, hearing that May was gone,
came back to talk to Moe , thinking of moving back in. Upon finding
Crazy Annie, they run off real fast. In January Crazy Annie decided
to go have her baby at her mother's house and Moe went along. Mike,
who had been here since 1990, kind of inherited a beach resort in Long
Island and moved there in April. The Ephratah catastrophe showed us
so clearly how strong the human need to give orders is, much stronger
than economic self-interest or security. I couldn't help but be amused by your last missive, not to belittle or minimize what I'm sure was a tragic episode. It's just that that sort of drama is so familiar to me, as someone who is often called in to mediate after things have already gone south. The Ephratah Episode certainly is appalling. It sounds like a microcosm of human society, and human society appalls the hell out of me most days. (I read way too much news.) It's intriguing, though. It seems to me that what's often needed is the ability to say "I have a problem with such-and-such a person" -- and mean it. That is, to understand that my problem with person X is just that: *my* problem, not necessarily or automatically everyone else's. That and an appeal to people's enlightened self-interest. And a healthy dose of empathy. And more than a touch of statecraft. And a dead chicken to wave over the entire process. P.S. Hey Dexter, what does IMO stand for? Could not find it in dictionary. Sorry -- "IMO" stands for "In My Opinion". Sometime you see "IMHO", which means In My Humble Opinion, but I think when God was giving out humility, the engineers thought he said "humidity" and stayed home all day with the AC on. Until now, we had not posted the Awful Depressing Letter on our web site because we thought that assigning too much reading all at once on would cause rioting in class, or massive cheating and skimming. On the other hand, if the good folks got it in installments, there was the hope they might even read it. However, with Dexter's commentary, the whole thing seems to become a bit more readable. I'm delighted and deeply flattered. This is real progress for me; in the past I was limited to inflicting unhappiness on small numbers of people at a time, usually in person. Now with the power of the Web, I can have unlimited reach! All that remains is the small matter of my fee. My going rate is $50.00 per word, but because I like you guys, I'll cut you a break: $49.95. Act now and I'll throw in some steak knives. Hello? |