Exercising Our Reason and Judgement

 John F. DiLeo writes a Letter From Facebook Jail that decries the fact that discrimination...the true meaning of the word...is lacking in favor of one size fits all solutions. In other words, DiLeo believes that we should look at the facts of individual cases, and make intelligent decisions based on based on those facts. We should, in other words, exercise our reason and our judgement.  

DiLeo is in "Facebook Jail" for posting a poem, written over 100 years ago by a British parliamentarian that includes the hanging of a person.  The discussion that ensued was a literary conversation about the qualities of the poem.  But Facebook put DiLeo into "Facebook Jail" not by having a human review the posts and determine if it indeed violated some vague, never specified community standard, but with literally an algorithm.  But Facebook, as irritating and arrogant as it is, is only reflecting the larger society.

DiLeo gives us some examples:

If a public school or coffee shop is a gun-free zone, then anything that looks like a gun is banned; police may be unwelcome unless they leave their sidearms in the car, and students can be suspended or expelled if they nibble a Pop-Tart into the shape of a handgun.

If a school has a no-smoking policy, then children can get disciplined for having candy cigarettes, just because they look like cigarettes.

If a surgical team in an operating room, cutting into a sick human being, wears masks in hope of protecting against infection, then surely mandating such masks for people walking in parks, driving alone in cars, and sitting in offices is just as sensible.

If a welfare plan – such as free housing, food, and medical care – makes sense for the aged and poor, then surely it makes just as much sense to offer such a welfare plan to everyone, regardless of age and condition, even regardless of citizenship. What’s good for 90-year-old WWII veterans who lived their lives in Chicago should also be provided to a caravan of Venezuelans who hiked through seven other countries to get here. Why not?

The people of Arizona and California have frequent water shortages. But if you buy a shower head or toilet in Michigan, in the very heart of the Great Lakes, that product must be designed with a water governor to limit your usage too. It’s federal law, applied nationwide, no matter whether you live in constant drought or you reside in a flood plain.

Wind and sunlight are free; to use windmills and solar panels to power a farmhouse in a sunny, windy area might be cost-efficient and sensible… but the federal government is now staffed with legions who worship the sun and wind as cure-alls and seek to impose dependence upon these sources on areas that lack both consistent wind and sun.

Each of these issues seems completely different from the others. Some are the choices of unions and associations, others the decree of school boards. Some are the unconstitutional whim of mayors and governors, some are the regulatory overreach of federal bureaucracies.

But what they have in common is a lack of judgment, a lack of understanding that circumstances differ, so situations require localized or personal discrimination.

These are but a few of the myriad cases where we have given up our individual judgements to what are essentially mindless "algorithms." One wonders where else this might be happening. The professions, people in the medical fields, lawyers and judges, engineers and architects to name a few, are licensed because they are specifically trained to exercise judgement and discriminate based on the facts of specific cases. Yet more and more these people are constrained by laws that make a one size fits all solution whether the facts actually fit or not.

Part of the reason people do not exercise their individual judgement is because of fear of being sued.  To be honest, there really are too many lawyers who also seem to lack reason and judgement.  The courts should shut these people down.  Indeed, we all need to exercise our reason and judgement.