Culture is a fundamental facet of identity. We all have culture(s) we identify with. But what counts as cultural appropriation is nuanced. Most of the time — but not all — adopting food is not appropriation. Most of the time — but not all — adopting ritual is. Whether or not adopting practices around clothing, hair, body decoration, home and environmental decorations are appropriation is impossible to predict in the abstract.
One nuance is that appropriation depends on who you are and your relationship to the locally dominant culture. In particular, adopting common practices of the dominant culture is often not considered appropriation — in fact, it may be considered a measure of that culture’s dominance. For example, most Christians in the United States don’t object to secular choirs singing Christmas hymns. Translate this same example to a non-dominant culture’s religious holidays, and the situation becomes much more ambiguous.
What makes the difference? A problematic explanation might be that because a locally dominant culture is aligned with the dominant power structures, that culture is less deserving of respect. In this perspective, the culture of, e.g., white Christian Americans in inherently less valuable than that of other cultures. This perspective is problematic and wrong.
In my perspective, a better model is to think of cultural practices as being subject to a social immune system. A dominant culture has the ability to defend itself. If a cultural marker is used inappropriately, there are plenty of members of around to object, and they generally will have ways to be heard. The social immune system is well tuned toward violations of the norms of a dominant culture. This leads to a situation where people can generally assume that what they see is what they get with regards to adopting the cultural practices of a locally dominant culture.
On the other hand, when markers of a non-dominant culture are used, there may not be people with the right background to say whether or not it is appropriate. Or they may object but not have the power or safety to make themselves heard. Thus, when we see a practice being adopted from a locally non-dominant culture, we can’t just assume that it’s okay. It might be problematic. It might be fine. When faced with this uncertainty, we should tread with caution. The social immune system isn’t tuned for these situations.
This isn’t an argument for static, isolated cultures. Cultures evolve over time, and practices can join or leave the locally dominant culture over time. Fashion and food, in particular, are areas of frequent cultural blending. Just as a physical immune system can learn to recognize new things as acceptable or unacceptable, the social immune system can move from “don’t know” to providing reliable feedback that a practice is or not okay to adopt.
One way this evolution happens is through invitation. Cultures are not monoliths and no single person (or group) can authoritatively speak for a culture. Still, as a rule of thumb, if a member of a culture invites you to participate in their practices or gives permission to your usage of a practice, then it’s probably not appropriation. So don’t avoid learning about and participating in practices that may not be a part of your culture. Don’t give into the fear that you might mess up. Instead, keep listening, keep asking, and let the invitations of others help you navigate the way.
(A lot more could be said about this. Invitation is a nuanced topic. For example, an invitation to participate in a particular event can be taken as permission to participate at that time but not necessarily as permission to duplicate the practice on your own. However, a more general invitation, such as selling a cookbook, is a pretty good indicator that you can duplicate the practice on your own.)
If it’s been awhile since you’ve updated your resume, it can be hard to know where to start. Today, I want to share the process that helped me convert 15 years at Google into a narrative which showed the progression of my career.
Even if you’ve been at the same company for years, you and your career evolved over time. Your goal is to figure out how to represent that as a story arc with defined beats. The right slicing for me was to structure my career by team. Your right slicing might be by role/level, location, or something else.
Whatever slice you choose, the goal is to represent your career in a way that is targeted toward your career goal. Tell the story of the sort of contributor you want to be.
Start with memory. Make your career journey live again. Go back — maybe even back to your school days. How did you end up the places you did? Include the bare facts — “started this team on this date and did these projects” — but also remember the things that add texture: who were the people you worked with? What did you like about them? Dislike? What were some inspiring accomplishments or frustrating challenges? Take the time to remember the fun things too — like the time 4 of us from my team distributed 60 inflatable Portal turrets around the office.
The purpose of this exercise is twofold: first, it will help you recall the bare facts that will make up your narrative. Second, it will bring your career back to life so that when you talk about it in interviews it’s clear that you’re talking from real experience, not memorized talking points.
Once you’ve spent some time walking down memory lane, capture key events. Include official transitions such as changing teams, changing roles, or getting promoted. Also include points of personal significance such as being chosen to run a significant project. For each point, write down information that captures why this milestone is important to you and your role in it. What did you do? What did this milestone mean for your career progression? Then capture why it was important to the company you worked for. This second part is where the data that resume advice stresses come in. As best as you can recall, what did you make better? Why? By how much? How many people and teams did you work with?
This is the raw data. Now it’s time to put it into a narrative. What that narrative looks like will depend on the role you are targeting. Do you want to apply for a role as a highly technical individual contributor? Look for points that emphasize your technical contribution and impact. Do you want to tell a story of someone who gets things done? Focus on data that shows an “after” that is significantly better for users or the company than the “before”. Looking to emphasize your leadership skills? Find the points in your narrative that show how you grew and impacted people and teams? Capture the points and supporting detail that support your desired narrative.
Now you are ready to write the actual resume. Follow the standard resume writing advice including things like removing company specific jargon, including keywords, being quantitative, etc. Be sure to run it by someone in your industry but who has no idea about the internals of the teams or companies you’ve worked for so they can make sure it makes sense without that context.
No resume can guarantee an interview, but by being intentional about how you think about your career in the context of the role you want to have, you can make sure that your resume is the best representation of how where you’ve been connects to where you want to go.
Back in the aughts, one of the ubiquitous personal productivity blogs recommend couple’s journals. The idea was that a couple have a journal that they share, exchanging it week by week to read what the other had written and share one’s own thoughts. My husband and I started one in 2009. It became a habit of reflection and sharing which, nearly 14 years later, we cannot imagine going without.
For the journal itself, we prefer pen and paper. Not just for the tangibility that leads folks to often prefer writing in a physical journal, but also because it makes the ritual of passing it back and forth feel more meaningful than it would with a digital artifact.
We trade off weekly and each try to write three times during the week. Whatever your schedule, having an exchange schedule and an expectation that each person will write at least once per period helps make it a conversation and a habit.
Most of what we write is a summary of our day-to-day. We also write about our hopes and concerns about the children, challenging things in our lives, and our relationship. Sometimes we write directly to each other, letter style, especially for things like sharing feelings about our relationship or following up on earlier conversations. Most of the time our writing voice is more descriptive.
So far, other than having two people, this is standard journaling fare. The value add comes from reading and reflection. When we exchange the journal, we each read what the other person wrote. Sometimes our own entries will be a direct response to what we read. Sometimes we’ll talk about it. Most often, we just read it and feel a little closer to each other’s day-to-day.
We’ve also developed a habit that wasn’t part of the original inspiration. About the time we built up five years worth of journals, we decided to start reading and reflecting on past journals. Each month we read the entries for that month from 1 year ago, 5 years ago, and (now) 10 years ago. We have found that this creates a lovely practice of reflection and gratitude. It helps us see the patterns in our lives — such as the fact that last year’s journal is almost always pretty similar to this year but 5 years ago is almost always completely different. (It’s also a good way to remember delicious meals that we should cook again.)
While I certainly can’t attribute all of the growth in our relationship to our journaling habit — time, age, children, and Todoist (seriously) have also had a role to play — I can say that it’s been a valuable tool in helping us communicate with each other, connect to our past, and deepen our relationship.
(I’ve delayed writing this post for years because it builds off an idea that I’ve never been able to find the source for. However, it comes up often enough that I’m just going to accept the lossy nature of learning from the internet.)
Generative conflict — collaborative debate as one of my mentors calls it — is critical to effective groups. It helps move a group from Tuckman’s forming stage to the storming stage. Although storming sounds bad, it is a critical period in the development of an effective team. Storming is when team members start to gain each others’ trust, align, and learn how to work together.
Why is generative conflict important for this transition? To build trust, you need to be able to share your perspectives. But if conflict doesn’t feel safe, then you will only share the perspectives that are unlikely to generate debate. That means that the team will not have access to the full range of each other’s perspectives. In addition, healthy conflict helps to build trust because it shows that even when we disagree, we can maintain our relationships with each other.
Making space for generative conflict is harder when teams are not colocated, whether this is because of hybrid work or just because teams are distributed between multiple offices. There isn’t anything inherently magical about being in person. However, there is something magical about open ended conversations. When a conversation has a convergent goal, then a choice has to be made. This automatically means that the options that are not chosen will be implicitly labeled as wrong — or at least less right. This raises the stakes. When a conversation is divergent, the stakes are lowered. Even if disagreeing feels a bit stressful, it is okay if we don’t come to a conclusion, which means that it’s less personally risky to bring up alternatives.
However, divergent conversations often feel like they’re a distraction from “real” work. We need to intentionally make time to have open ended conversations where people can bring up options and respond to each other without the risk of having their opinion implicitly declared wrong when something else is chosen.
It is time to once again share my abortion experience.
This is my baby Flora. I loved her. I love her. I aborted her. My husband and I held her until her body was cold.
I aborted her because she had suffered significant brain damage that probably wasn’t life threatening but which would probably have put her in the lower 15% of those with mental disabilities and have given her physical limitations that meant that she could not do intense physical activities – even headaches or mild fevers would have meant hospital trips.
I aborted her because I have an older child, and for every touching story of a sibling who learned compassion having a sibling with similar scale of health issues, I read many more of children who were neglected because their parents had no time for them. They often ended up with addiction and emotional problems of their own. I read about how some of these siblings came to hate their parents and/or sibling because of the caretaking duties forced upon them when the parents could no longer fill that role. And if they don’t take on this role, either personally or financially, they have to live with the guilt of putting their sibling into an institutional situation where they are all but certain to experience abuse, neglect, and poverty. I could make a choice to be a lifelong caretaker for myself. I did not feel I had the choice to make it for my other child.
I aborted her because the vast majority of marriages with children like Flora end up divorced, often after extreme economic hardship. Even if not, the parents end up suffering from social isolation as their friends and even family drift away.
I did not make this choice easily. Years later, I still wonder if I did the right thing. Maybe the fiveish percent chance of her being relatively high functioning would have come to pass. Maybe we would have been one of the minority of families that can go through this and have everyone come out stronger. But at the end of the day, I do not regret my choice. And I am grateful that it was *my* choice, not the choice of some legislators going on generalities and assumptions about how there are no good reasons to choose this heartbreaking choice. Today, many women lost that choice.
Starting with the caveat that I am rather sympathetic to the actual curriculum associated with proposals for teaching critical race theory in schools, I think it’s worth noting that many of the reshared social media explanations of what it “actually” is focus on the race part and leave out the academic history of critical theory. This article about four different Americas (which is long but interesting in its own right) has as concise definition as any I’ve seen of what critical theory is:
“Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.”
Reading this definition, I hope it becomes easier to understand why some people object to critical theory so strongly. (For a longer and more nuanced discussion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good source.) Critical race theory is critical theory as applied to race, so it looks at race through the lens where objectivity, rationality, science, equality, and freedom of the individual are the causes of problems experienced by those who are subject to racial injustice.
I personally see critical theory, whether applied to race or any other topic, as a valuable lens to apply to see what I’ve been missing, but harmful when used as a totalizing worldview. Undeniably, the values of the Enlightenment have been used for subjugation; anything that can be used for subjugation will be used for it at some point (including the call for social justice) and we should understand the mechanisms behind it. However, these values are so much more than just tools of subjugation. When we reduce them to nothing more than that we risk throwing out the very foundation which provides the justification for saying that there should be justice for those who currently do not have it.
If you wonder how we can celebrate the values of the Enlightenment when they contain within them the seeds of racism and injustice, it may be worth inverting our perspective. Instead, we can observe that the world that preceded those ideas was rife with inequality and injustice (by modern standards) and the ideas of the Enlightenment tenuously planted the seeds of equality and justice. However, it is our failing if we believe the claims that those seeds were done growing at any point in history so far, be it the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, or whatever other moments might be seen as checkpoints on the journey. We need to keep growing them.
I recently finished reading Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. The basic thesis is that setting objectives is futile for significant innovation. Objectives can be useful for incremental improvements, but for innovation, we do not know that the path that progress requires. Measuring incremental improvements against the final goal is likely to result in the pursuit of dead ends that seem like they should be moving closer but which are actually missing a vital stepping stone. The vital stepping stones usually require going in a non-obvious direction. You can read more in my goodreads review .
As a colleague noted in a book club discussion of this book, the argument presented in the book is somewhat lacking. It focuses overly much on the particular path that was used to get to some interesting end. E.g., “Computers are great! They needed vacuum tubes. Who would have thought that when first trying to invent computers?” They observe that this assumes that reaching a particular objective is fully path dependent: there is only one particular way to get there from here. In practice, there are likely to be multiple ways to get to a particular end. Vacuum tubes may have been how we first got to scalable computation, but they likely were not the only path to silicon. Bicycles may have been one path to commercial flight, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only one.
A better argument for the futility of objectives to reach ambitious objectives is one that pulls from The Tyranny of the Ideal (my review). In that book Gerald Gaus develops the idea that targeting an ideal is a futile effort. That book describes the ideals in the context of the landscape of justice. I will generalize to talk about objectives more generally.
A fitness landscape provides a way of thinking about how well different agents are doing relative to a particular fitness function. The fitness is the “height” of point in the landscape while the other dimensions of the space represent how similar two points in that landscape are to each other (where closer implies more similarity). In biological evolution, the fitness function is reproductive success and the units being assessed for similarity are genotypes. Fitness landscapes are usually visualized in two or three dimensions. Reality is, of course, often has many more dimensions.
The thing that makes a fitness landscape interesting is that two points that are close to each other may not have similar fitness. For example, a small mutation can cause an organism to die, reducing its fitness to zero.
Gaus differentiates between fitness landscapes that are smooth, rugged, and random. These are a spectrum more than distinct types, but I will describe them as types for simplicity.
In a smooth fitness landscape, following the gradient of increasing fitness will always lead you to a global maxima of fitness. In the diagram above, if the fitness landscape consisted only of peak B, it would be smooth.
In a rugged fitness landscape, following the gradient of the fitness function will generally lead to greater fitness. However, a particular position may be a local maxima—there is no more “up” to follow locally—yet globally there are better places to be. The diagram above depicts a rugged fitness landscape. For the red ball, both A and B represent increased fitness, but they do not achieve the same maximum.
In a random fitness landscape, there is no predictability. A step one direction may dramatically increase fitness while the next step may plunge it to nothing. There is nothing to rely upon. It’s hard to survive in a random landscape. Gaus notes that the justice landscape is rugged, like the landscape of many other complex systems.
(Note that a fitness landscape need not be static static. They can be dynamic or, to use the more poetic term, dancing (coined, I believe, by Scott Page). A dancing landscape is one that changes over time. It can change in response to external forces or it can change in response to internal forces, such as when plants evolve to be more attractive to pollinators.)
What does this have to do with objectives? Objectives specify a destination we are trying to get too. In the thinking of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, objectives are often used to derive an objective function where the direction we explore is determined by measuring the distance between where we currently are and the objective. Distance from the objective becomes our fitness function.
The thesis of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is that using objectives this way is doomed to failure because charting a course straight for an objective means that you miss out on critical stepping stones that may seem, at first, to take you further from the objective. The world of innovation is a rugged landscape. Following what looks like the obvious direction may land you at a dead end, a local maxima from which no more progress can be made.
So that addresses one of the objections to objectives made in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: objective functions are bad for innovation because innovation occurs in a rugged fitness landscape.
But that does not explain why Stanley and Lehman, the authors of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned reject objectives as firmly as they do. You can have an objective without using it as an objective function. While I think they take the rejection of objectives a bit far, we can delve further into Gaus’ work to see why there is a seed of truth in their rejection of objectives.
Gradient ascent—simply following the path up—is not the only way to move through the search space. We can look further afield. If we can see the whole landscape, we can figure out which direction to go even if simply maximizing the objective function will lead us down the wrong path. But can we do this? Stanley and Lehman use a metaphor of using stepping stones to navigate across a foggy lake. Gaus states this idea more precisely. He defines a neighborhood as the region in a fitness landscape that we can make reasonably well founded predictions about. Regions in our neighborhood represent small deltas from our current world. Like in the stepping stones metaphor, as we move through this rugged landscape, we learn more and revise our vision of where we can go.
We can only chart a reliable path to an objective when it’s within our neighborhood of knowledge. Because of this fogginess, if the global maxima is not in our neighborhood, then we have no idea where it is. It might be along the current direction of ascent or it might be in a completely different direction. Of course, the neighborhood is really a continuum, not a binary. Thus, there’s not really a strict cutoff of areas where objectives are or are not useful. Rather, the lesson to take away is that the further an objective is from your current knowledge base, the less able you are to navigate there. This is true even when the objective itself can be precisely stated.
Inverting this, we can understand the situations where objectives are useful. When everything we need to know to reach the objective is within our neighborhood of knowledge, then an objective can useful. The objective function still isn’t useful; we may still need to go down before we go up the right hill. Rather, because the objective is nearby, we can chart reliable turn-by-turn directions to our destination. And if the objective is just outside our neighborhood of knowledge, we can do work to expand our neighborhood of knowledge (e.g., building MVPs) to increase the feasibility of being able to meet our objectives.
So, to sum up, in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned Stanley and Lehman argue that objectives are misleading because the path from here to there may require some unforeseeable side quests. Looking at this through the lens Gaus develops in The Tyranny of the Ideal we can make this more precise: because innovation is a rugged landscape, using distance from an objective as a objective function gives little guidance about which way to go. Furthermore, the limitation of our knowledge to local neighborhoods—the fog between stepping stones—means that we cannot reliably chart out a course even if we are willing to deviate from a more seemingly direct path.
Here’s a conundrum: social media helps us get to know each other just well enough to dislike each other.
Many of the people we interact with on social media are more than just acquaintances. We interact with just deeply enough to be “friendish.” The fictional Emily Byrd Starr sums it up:
“Jen is a nice, sensible girl and she and I are friendish. That is a word of my own coining. Jen and I are more than mere acquaintances but not really friendly. We will always be friendish and never more than friendish. We don’t talk the same language.”
As Emily reminds us from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, friendish relationships are nothing new. In the quote above, Emily was speaking of her cousin. Extended family has long been a source of friendish relationships. Educational institutions, work, community organizations, and even small enough communities are others. In all of these, some number of people move beyond the level of acquaintance without making it to friendship. However, social media has increased the circle of those we are friendish with. Many people have hundred of social media relationships, a decent number of which are active enough to make it into the friendish space.
Social media has also changed the nature of those relationships. When people are bound by an organization or physical coexistence, their obligations to that context creates at least a small moderating influence. If you have to work with someone tomorrow, you will more often choose to just keep quiet when they frustrate you. Sometimes we have a moral obligation to speak up against those we disagree with. Most of the time though, speaking up against those we disagree with just entrenches their opinions.
“Friendish” doesn’t sound so bad, right? Sure, we may not be real friends with most of our social media connections (even if we once were), but our interactions with them are still mostly neutral to positive. But what happens when we have a negative interaction? When they share that one annoying (or worse) opinion? The problem with friendish is that it quickly diminishes to mere tolerance or outright dislike.
Having so many friendish relationships unmediated by consequential obligations is a dangerous place to be. During the Trump years, we saw just how little friendish relationships are worth as polarization drove us to hate and disconnect from people we once had a positive regard for. In some cases, these negative feelings spilled over into real life causing rifts in families. Contexts such as family can encourage people to become friendish, but once a relationship had been damaged, that context may not be enough to repair it.
How can we strengthen our relationships to be more resilient? We can’t all be real friends. Friendship is about more than shared context. It’s about, as Emily put it, speaking the same language. However, friendship is only one way we learn how to treat each other with dignity.
What is dignity? I’m working off of the definition in the work of Donna Hicks, in particular her work Leading with Dignity. Dignity is the inherent honor we owe to others because they exist as a feeling, conscious being. Hicks differentiates dignity from respect. Respect is earned. Dignity is inherent. Honoring dignity is a stronger call to action than respect or empathy. It doesn’t matter what someone does. It doesn’t matter how much you hate them (or their opinion). There is still some modicum of honor that they deserve.
According to Hicks, there are ten elements of dignity. Violating any of these is likely to reduce trust.
Acceptance of identity
Recognition
Acknowledgment
Inclusion
Safety (physical and psychological)
Fairness
Independence
Understanding
Benefit of the doubt
Accountability for your own actions when you do something that may violate the dignity of others
Nearly every relationship has the potential build a foundation of dignity. Given the right setting, most of us can learn to see each other as feeling, conscious beings and avoid the violations of dignity that easily turn friendish relationships acrimonious.
Here’s the problem: Social media, by default, does not lend itself to upholding dignity. At its rare best, social media can be a place of acceptance, recognition, acknowledgement, and inclusion. However, it can also be a place of disapproval, danger, herd following, and jumping to conclusions. For the most part, if you primarily interact with somebody through social media, your relationship will be stuck at friendish. We will know just enough about each other to be annoyed but not enough to feel empathetic.
We each handle this tension differently. Some people are intentional about building an online persona (or more than one). Others ,in what could be seen as a special case of a persona, dilute their presence to only what is uncontroversial. Rare and valuable are the individuals who can develop real friendship through the impersonal tools of social media.
However people deal with this as individuals, the broader problem is societal. We are existing at scale in what we might consider the uncanny valley of human relationships. We’re both closer to and further from others than humans have been for most of our history. Where there are analogous situations, such as the workplace or multi-year educational institutions, where we might have a lot of friendish relationships, those real life institutions are much better at helping us build a core of real friends. With social media, that core usually has to be built outside of the tool (or in its less visible side channels).
I don’t think we are going back. Broad scale social media is part of our landscape now. Individuals can choose to pull away from it. However, we have seen over recent years that the effects go beyond individuals. They are societal, and we can’t escape them. We have to go forward. I don’t know how to do that, but I suspect it will require us to learn to be both more and less in these spaces. We will need to find ways to bring more depth to our online relationships and we will need to better control our online presence.
However, we cannot do this alone. Some of the solution will be technical. Social media companies can do a better job of helping people show up as the self they want to be. The Eugene Wei article Status as a Service is a good exploration of how different ways of earning status on a social media platform shape the behavior of the individuals there. Most platforms today are optimized for volume of engagement rather than depth of engagement, and that shows.
A larger part of the solution will likely be around how our norms and values around using online spaces evolve. We can already see this in how folks who grew up with social media use it. The Status as a Service article goes into how on Instagram some people have many personas and cycle through them rapidly. They understand intuitively what I understand intellectually: That just is in real life, squishing everything into a single persona online makes you the least common denominator value of yourself rather than the most expansive union. Will the rest of us be able to learn that? Will learning how to be online together civilly require a generational turnover? And either way, can we learn how to coexist online before the real world consequences cause even more damage than they already have?
Preface: Contains major spoilers for Bridgerton season 1, discussion of nonconsensual sex, and minor spoilers of Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey.
Any human system where what one person does can affect another is designed. That does not mean it is designed well, intentionally, or holistically but it is, inevitably, designed. So better to try to design well, intentionally, and holistically than to avoid the responsibility.
I’m defining design in human systems as the creation of norms and rules which designate reaction in response to patterns of behavior. In that sense, every human relationship is designed, not by a divine watchmaker but by the system of norms and rules, implicit and explicit, that those relationships are embedded in.
Design is, intentionally, a loaded term in this context. I suspect that something like “evolved” would get less push back. But human systems, to a degree not true of ecological systems (although not altogether false of ecological systems) are systems that are consciously and intentionally manipulated by their agents, resulting in something that I think is deserving of the term design. Humans have the ability to notice the consequences of our choices and in response we can change our own choices and, critically, try to change the choices of others.
An important aside: holistic is not the same as totalizing. Holistic means to look at how the parts interact and try to anticipate and account for the rippling effects of individual design choices. Totalizing means trying to control the way that design choices propagate through a system. Ecologically inspired design thinking is holistic. High modern command and control design thinking is totalizing. Although the words have some similarity in their implication of completeness, they are largely opposites.
