It is Hard to Tell the Difference….

The chalk clacked and scraped across the chalkboard on the first day of class, as my professor wrote something. He had barely finished introducing himself and welcoming students before he started writing.

“We are going to discuss many things — things that people have disagreed about intensely. Right here at the beginning, I want to give you something that will help clarify your thinking.”

He stepped away from the chalkboard to show what he had written:

It is hard to tell the difference between a bad idea and a bad implementation of a good idea.

What a mouthful! But this statement has remained with me through the years. I have seen how many of the huge changes in society have been empowered and driven by what this statement is about. Whether it is in politics, morality, cultural norms, or technology, change is often driven by a narrative that claims that a historical or current way of doing things is bad. But is it always so?

Take traditional marriage, for example. Amelia Earhart famously criticized traditional marriage, going so far as to call traditional expectations of faithfulness in marriage a “midaevil [sic] code”. But is traditional marriage itself a bad idea? Or was Amelia actually motivated by seeing bad examples of traditional marriage? Her biography shows that she was exposed to plenty of bad examples. It is hard to tell the difference….

Or consider capitalism. Carl Marx famously criticized capitalism in his world-changing book Das Kapital. But is capitalism itself a bad idea? Capitalism can certainly be implemented badly, and bad examples abound. But those bad examples don’t necessarily mean that capitalism is a bad idea. It is hard to tell the difference….

I’m sure you can think of other examples. For issue after issue, change in the last 100+ years has been driven by those who assert that something is fundamentally bad, and it must be replaced by something else. They have supported their views with compelling examples — a technique that is both reasonable and effective. At the same time, maybe sometimes their examples are really examples of good ideas that have simply been implemented badly. It is hard to tell the difference….

To wrap things up, here is a rather silly poem. I hope it inspires you to do the extra work to look beyond the examples or stories that people use to support a particular narrative or point of view. After all, it is hard to tell the difference…

The IIHTTTDBABIAABIOAGI Principle

The door of debate
swings endlessly on this hinge:

It is hard to tell the difference between
   a bad idea
and a bad implementation of
   a good idea.

IIHTTTDBABIAABIOAGI

So we know, 
Acronyms are a bad idea.

-NOD-