The current culture shift toward team behavior has occurred over multiple generations. The people in teams seem to have people who are content with their place in the team. More significantly, they seem to be content in staying in their place indefinitely.
Ultimately, the modern workplace fears soloists. They have good reason to fear them. The soloist has power. Like in a music concert, if the soloist can’t show up, the show can not go on with just the accompanists. If the soloist fails, there is nothing the accompanist can do to save the show.
When a customer gets his hair cut, there is only one person doing the cutting from the start to the finish. That cutting involves observing, analyzing, planning, and acting. He succeeds because this is not a team effort.
The fact that we have achieved a population life expectation that is at this number provides proof that this is the right number, or a least a lower limit to what the right number should be. I wonder whether it might have been just an accident of history. The high life expectation was a deviation from the normal value. Perhaps it will be inevitable that we will revert to a much lower norm.
A sabbatical is a legitimate option for career training. This is the only time a person can learn how to fill in unstructured time. Doing so develops skills in how to create jobs where none were defined before. The key element of extended absences is the completely unstructured time. Things that do need to be done can take much longer than normally would be allowed in a work setting.
The social status type system could offer a way to greatly reduce the need for police force to apprehend a suspected criminal. All that would be necessary would be to change that person’s credit score so that he will no longer be able to use most of public or social resources. That change is status is sufficient for that individual to eventually seek out a remedy that will allow the government to deal with him appropriately. No police force required.
The freeze dance game is an analogy of what lock down subjects to young people. In that game, someone plays music that everyone enjoys dancing to. When everyone starts getting well into their dancing, someone stops the music and everyone must freeze in their position. Anyone who continues to move is taken out of the game, even if that movement involves catching ones balance. When translated to real life, it is most hazardous for the younger generations.
The current government’s obsession over the absolute numbers ignores the fact that when this is over, these casualties will only be numbers. In the future, our government will have to contend with the remaining survivors. At that time, the survivors will judge the government’s wisdom in prioritizing dark data over the observations available to it.
The biggest failing of science in the current COVID situation is its inability to react to new evidence that its original conclusions were wrongly decided, and the assurances to governments were incompetent. We implicitly accept that any initial science-based decisions attains some law-like status that is automatically presumed to be true until there is overwhelming evidence that it is wrong. In particular, such decision making does not permit a simple apology for making a mistake following new data that clearly disproves the original science.
We may end up with a society of shut-ins who will not only obediently follow the guidance and laws for social distancing, but they will also be alert to report any neighborhood violators of the same rules. Within this backdrop, there will be men who do go outside the majority isolation rules and pursue their interests despite the neighborhood harassment.
Hypothesis Discovery 