Simple Questions

The phrase or question, "What Would Jesus Do?" seems to have originated more than 100 years back, but was trending in the US zeitgeist during the 1990's. It was used as a shorthand to remind followers of Christianity that they should stick to their moral imperative consistently. There was even a wristband popularized at that time that had the letters WWJD. It was given to teenagers to wear, so that they will be nudged to make the "right" decisions whenever they get caught in a moral quandary. I liked the simplicity of the framing that is easy to remember to analyze any given situation that requires a right or wrong decision. 

Along those lines, I try to come up with simple questions that will help me assess large and complex worldly situations so that I don't get hoodwinked into compelling arguments that may be narrow or use emotional troupes. Here are two examples:

Take this nice Trevor Noah's take on the conflict between Palestine & Israel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ4yXyzUG0 

As he points out, depending upon which particular point in time you start your narration with, you can make one side or the other look like monsters/victims. Contrast this scenario with the discussions found in this old but delightful book called How to Lie with Statistics? that I was reviewing couple of years back. It shows how by selectively choosing data points (that are all technically true/correct but incomplete) you can paint different pictures out of the same scenario. This is of course made into a sellable art now, with the name "Spin Doctors" given to the practitioners of this trade! These points may remind us of the elementary school story where five blind people perceive different parts of an elephant and describe it in five different ways. Since the individual stories we are told in any given instance could be narrow, anecdotal, emotionally wrenching, one simple framing question I try to ask to orient myself is this: Is this complete? If we brush aside the latest/anecdotal/narrow stories that bother us and ask this question to get the full picture of the situation in both time and space perspectives, perhaps it will help us understand the issue more holistically that may move us towards solutions that are comprehensive.  

For the second example, I am going somewhere else. My wife routinely puts herself through a lot of inconvenience to do that right thing. She will go to extraordinary lengths to take cloth bags to grocery stores so as not to add to the environmental pollution by using single use plastic bags (though in the state of Pennsylvania plastic bag usage is not outlawed). She supports CSA (Comunity Supported Agriculture), always insists on us buying organic produce, etc. My friend friend Sanjay spends most of his Sundays volunteering to mentor economically impoverished young school age girls. The organization he works for guides them through school, basic college and careers. These girls come from such low strata of the society that you won't find Hollywood ending where they all become Doctors and highly paid software engineers in few years to happily live ever after. It is not practical. The organization guides them through the process to get a simple three-year degree and perhaps a bank teller type job. I admire both my wife and friend for the enormous amount of time and effort they put in to do the right thing. But if I step back and look at the big picture, I realize that the plastic industry has trained us to believe that it is the end users to responsibility to recycle plastic (or avoid single use plastic bags) absolving themselves completely. If you dig into the statistics, you will see how the recycle program is a big farce and <10% of plastic and other artificial material every produced were ever recycled. While CSA type programs may be very emotionally appealing, it boils down to subsistence farming type model that can't feed the entire world's population efficiently, as has been determined in the last century itself. Similarly, rather than spending years where Sanjay is donating all his Sundays to mentor a small number of girls to lift them up, perhaps going with what China did to improve its economy dramatically for 30 years will work better to bring lot more people out of poverty, lift them up to better careers much more quickly? Thus, while I have nothing but admiration for people trying to do the right thing at the local level, I try to ask, "Does this approach scale?". The word scale here means does this solution approach solve the problem at the world level? If not, should we spend our time and energy on models that will get big problems solved as a byproduct (like what economic growth does to solve so many problems related to malnutrition, living standards, career opportunities, exposure, etc.) rather than solving those problems individually, inefficiently? 

After reading this post, you may wonder, "Isn't this obvious? Does this require a page long write up?". So, I'd like to summarize the purpose of the post, so that the reader is not mislead to think that I am debating the areas discussed in the two examples. I am asking/hoping that I will learn something through any interesting responses you provide as to how you distill complex scenarios. Do you use any such framing devices to distill or analyze problems in a simpler way?