On getting Forked...

I was watching the video of the Playboy reporter and the White House press secretary Sanders, and was struck by something he said:

Come on, you’re inflaming everybody right here, right now, with those words. This administration has done that as well. Why in the name of heaven — any one of us are replaceable, and any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us.

You have been elected to serve for four years at least. There is no option other than that. We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers. And what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, “See, once again, the president is right and everybody else out here is fake media.” And everybody out here is only trying to do their job.

Now, regardless of which side of that argument you come down on, there was some unwitting truth there -- that there is a disparity between the pressures the media faces, which is that people are constantly and instantly adjusting their surroundings to something that suits them, versus the president that we all have to share for 4 years and are either stuck with or blessed with, depending on your point of view. The news is personalized and responsive. You can listen to news that is completely different than news I listen to and both of us are happy. But we all have to share the president and are stuck with him even if we don't like him, and that is guaranteed to make half of us unhappy.

@kyriacos and I were apparently thinking along similar lines this morning:

https://steemit.com/nature/@kyriacos/we-can-t-agree-on-pizza-toppings-but-we-can-save-the-planet

So to take that pizza analogy, if we all insist on choosing a pizza together, then most of us won't get what we want, but rather a few will get what they want, many will get something they are just willing to tolerate, and a few will get something they hate. But if we all agree to get our own pizza, then we all get what we want.

The takeaway is that forcing ourselves to all choose one monolithic thing together is stupid because it links things together that don't have to be linked, and the more you tie things together, the more the system makes people unhappy because that represents a forced choice that is unnecessary.

In chess, this forced choice is called "getting forked." If you are foolish enough to place two pieces in the wrong spot, then I can threaten both with a knight at the same time. You are then stuck. You can't attack me, and if you move one piece, then I attack the other one. So the only choice left for you to make is which piece you want to lose. Which is not an enjoyable position to be in. You feel helpless and stupid, because you actually allowed it to happen to yourself. You "Forked" yourself, in other words.

http://www.learnchessrules.com/faq6-forks.htm

Forcing ourselves to all choose something together places society in the position of getting forked, because it guarantees that someone will not get what they want. Once that catastrophically poor decision is made, the only salvage left for society is to try to make as few people unhappy as possible -- to choose the solution that the greater number of people want, which is the more valuable piece, and sacrifice the solution that the lesser number of people want, which is the less valuable piece. Proponents of group decisions tend to only focus on making the greatest number of people happy, but gloss over the fact that this can only come at the expense of forking the minority.

Come on people! Let's stop Forking ourselves!