Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Cowardice is a sin

When I say this, I’m fully aware that I sound like someone who should clank when I walk and have strong opinions about chivalry. But I mean it in both a broader and more specific context.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

Granny Weatherwax, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (drawn right by Paul Kidby)

Terry Pratchett had a huge influence on me. Particularly as regards militant decency, the decision to do the right thing consistently and powered by rage. So when I speak of cowardice, I mean moral cowardice. Risk assessment resulting in avoiding physical danger and injury are actually pretty great. But moral cowardice, and deciding that the principles that you hold dear are negotiable and unimportant? That is a betrayal of self. And, to bring it back to Terry Pratchett and Granny Weatherwax, treating yourself as a thing with no moral agency.

That sounds very high-minded, doesn’t it? And also wildly impractical and irrelevant to the real world. But on the contrary: I think it’s relevant pretty often, depending what your principles are. There is a vegan in my knitting group who made their choice on animal welfare grounds. As such, it extends not just to their diet but to choices of materials – like their enthusiasm about a local yarn store now carrying blends containing Ahimsa silk.

For me, it would be downright stupid to work somewhere that campaigned against LGBTQIA+ individuals. I mean, they probably wouldn’t hire me, but part of being good at my job resulting in my life getting worse? Ridiculous. So that’s a non-issue. Where this principle becomes relevant is that I would consider it an act of cowardice to work somewhere where I was strongly encouraged (regardless of the organization’s actual mission) to never mention anything regarding LGBTQIA+ issues or felt like I could not safely bring my whole self to work. I’m not generally particularly flamboyant, but being in an environment where I wouldn’t feel comfortable making a Subaru joke would mean I was self-censoring, editing, chiseling myself down like a thing rather than a person.

Cowardice is a sin. Sacrificing portions of your self and values on the altar of palatability and lack of friction is, to me, unambiguously negative. I also think it’s unlikely to work long-term, and that the stress and misery of that is the wages of sin.

Not everyone has such clearcut priorities and principles in such easily identifiable places, but I think it is and always will be worthwhile to identify what your principles are and where they come to bear in your life.

I also don’t think being deeply and entirely convinced that cowardice is a sin is a hard and fast barrier to committing it; I am aware of my limitations and priorities. At this point in my job search I’d happily commit a few sins for a steady paycheck.

But I wouldn’t let myself pretend that they weren’t sins.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

Ethics and Aesthetics

Shortly after I was laid off in November of last year, I was invited to join the Alliance for Policy Research. It’s a startup think tank with a slate of world-class experts on public health, mathematical modeling, urban planning, and of course disasters and emergency management. Part of it being a startup is that we need to nail down and articulate fundamental principles, like our rates, code of conduct, and quality standards. As Quality Assurance Manager, I’ve been meeting with two of my colleagues the past couple of weeks to get our quality standards laid out.

A fair number of us at APR are ex-RAND, which has really well-articulated quality standards. All of us have at least an inchoate instinct that research should be done right, with good methods and facts and findings that come from facts and not the desires of the sponsor. We want to find and contribute to truth and knowledge in the world and make it better – hit the “healthier, wealthier, happier” goals that are our tagline. But the challenge is articulating that clearly, concretely, and concisely as a set of standards.

Part of what inspired this post is that we were workshopping and one of the things that we had come up with is we want our research to be credible. But then one revisits dictionary definitions of things to make sure that they are precisely and accurately what one means. And what we found for credible was:

  • able to be believed or trusted
  • possessing the quality of being trustworthy

The secondary definition gave us pause. Because yes, we want to produce research that people can believe, trust, and rely on. And we want to be considered trustworthy. But we want those things to be based on observable and actionable things – on our utility, not just the impression we give.

Though I pointed out, and this is some of why I’m posting, that we do also need to give the impression. It’s important, because it’s how we convince people to pay us to do the research where we can prove it. We need the aesthetics in order to get the chance to prove our underlying ethics. But for people who deal in facts and policy and want to save the world the need for deliberate focus on the aesthetics feels antithetical.

So we’re taking this weekend to think about how we want to break down the idea of credibility into principles and keywords that we feel are more accurate, precise, and representative. I’m also taking the weekend to write things up as a demonstration of how now that we’re writing in a less constrained environment we also need to think about how we incorporate aesthetics into our external quality standards vs our internal code of conduct vs how we talk about these processes and how transparent we want to be. It’s fun!

In the meantime if you work for an organization that needs data or policy analysis done by a group of world-class analysts you should hire us.