Journal

When we organize our society around fake meritocracy, we erase the history of exploitation and the ways the game is rigged to prevent economic and social mobility.

A central premise of this book is that policing is “a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo”. This is argued with various historical examples of police action (Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police, Texas Rangers, Chinese Exclusion Act, Red scare, Civil rights marches, Southern Strategy, etc.) that are scattered throughout.

This framing is used to set the scene for various problems with contemporary policing. The book take a high-level approach to introducing these issues, focusing on breadth over depth.

Some TL;DR quotes of various chapters that I valued the most:

• On policing in schools, “the overall approach of relying on armed police to deal with safety issues has led to a massive increase in arrests of students that fundamentally undermines the educational mission of schools, turning them into an extension of the larger carceral state and feeding what has come to be called the school-to-prison pipeline.”
• On the border patrol, the author argues “[w]e cannot and should not rely on ever more intensive, violent, and oppressive border policing to manage problems that we ourselves helped create.”
• On criminalizing homelessness:

Even if criminalization was successful, legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical. We live in an economic and social environment in which the market is unable to house people at the bottom of the economic order and government is unwilling to make up the difference. Given this reality, how can we justify treating homelessness as a criminal justice issue? The law appears to be applied universally, but this fails to take into account the fact that the poor are always under greater pressure to break it and at greater risk of being subjected to legal action. As Anatole France pointed out in 1894, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”

The book’s title appears more strongly opinionated than its contents. The book doesn’t call for dissolution of policing in those words, but does argue that for most of the problems that police are trying to solve, police are not the solution. Instead, health programs, jobs programs, better foreign policy, etc. all solve the root problems instead of the symptoms.

We need to invest in individuals and communities and transform some of the basic economic and political arrangements in our society. Chemical dependency, trauma, and mental health issues play a huge role in undermining the safety and stability of neighborhoods. People who are suffering need help, not coercive treatment regimes or self-help pabulum; they need access to real services from trained professionals using evidence-based treatments.

Overall, the book is a broad primer for current policing practices, their histories, and areas for improvement.

Clade is a weekend read about a near future where climate change has accelerated, bringing with it disaster as it worsens.

The book is short. Disproportionately it spans across three generations of family facing the increasingly bad environmental affects of climate change.

In trying to cover so much ground, the book fails to develop the characters, their motivations, and the full implications of the changing world around them.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time.

This book contains some nuggets of wisdom, surrounded by noise and some out-of-date topics. Overall, I think it is worth speed-reading, noting the valuable nuggets and then ruminating on those.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• When reading, it was sometimes abrupt jumping between sections that were written in the late 1987 edition and the 2013 revision. Talk of IBM and its glory could be followed by a reference to an iPod. This didn’t truly undercut the author’s points, but were definitely jarring.
• Lots of truisms that weren’t well backed up with non-anecdotal evidence – the author knows that x is better but doesn’t explain why. While I agree with a lot of them, it’s unclear how we got there and if I should really trust my gut (and this author).
• Even if I agree with the author’s premise, it’s unclear how to go about improving things. The author provides some recommendations on various problems/ways to improve teams, but they’re relatively light.

Overall I don’t regret reading it.

Quotes

On the purpose of a manager:

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

On hiring:

Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. They test whether he or she is likely to be good at statistical analysis or programming or whatever it is that’s required in the position. You can buy aptitude tests in virtually any technical area, and they all tend to have fairly respectable track records at predicting how well the new hire will perform. But so what? A successful new hire might do those tasks for a few years and then move on to be team leader or a product manager or a project head. That person might end up doing the tasks that the test measured for two years and then do other things for twenty.

Compelling. At the very least it’s clear that ethics should be taught in every computer science program and even more broadly.

This book is similar to Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil (in fact this book even quotes it).

The book explores one major tenet: that we use digital systems to manage poverty – systems that the middle class would never stand for if they were used against themselves – that are ineffective at actually improving the conditions of those they are meant to serve.

A quote from early in the introduction:

Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.

Throughout the book, the Eubanks provides examples of systems that dehumanize and otherwise hurt the most vulnerable.

At the end of the book, after showing just how hurtful some of these systems can be, Eubanks recommends we implement an ethical oath for building systems, similar in nature to the hippocratic oath. While the oath itself is relatively long (but I agree 100% with it), the final line resonates the most with me:

I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.

I think this book, or one like it, should be mandatory reading for every person who builds systems that affect real human lives.

This will be a brief post in the hopes of writing more, smaller, posts more often.

I’ve long had a desire to minimize the number of things I own. This is for a number of reasons, a good subject for another day.

One of the recent realizations I’ve had – in the last year or so – is that one of the key reasons that I sprawl in ownership is due to a lack of focus.

This lack of focus – in creating and maintaining various systems that compete for my time and space – leads to an increased surface area of things that I am forced to think about and to care about.

And with a fixed amount of time, many of these systems will lie underutilized.

A few concrete examples of systems in my life could be playing guitar, running, or playing video games. Each requires distinct tools and time to utilize and progress.

The more of these systems I have, the more I have to buy, own, and maintain. Similarly, the more my time is spread over these different systems.

Because of this, I am starting to believe it is much more impactful to reduce the number of distinct systems in my life than to try to reduce within a system.

This feels analogous to goals: the fewer goals one has, the more focus one can have. The fewer systems I have, the more focus I can give to these systems to value them in my life.