wife and I were talking about [controversial topic] recently and trying to figure out how we feel about it – and I found myself saying, it's important that we distinguish between degrees of bad. a 39°C fever is bad, yes, and a 42°C fever needs immediate hospitalization

when triaging X cases, statements like "all X are bad" are not very helpful. the more serious a problem, the more clinical and careful you have to be with the precise meanings of your words, because mixing things up ends up depriving the worst-affected of the help they need

it's ~true that everybody is going through difficult times. the experience of pain, etc can be quite subjective

and: a person screaming about a papercut obviously doesn't deserve priority over a person who's stoically enduring a gunshot wound

and: it gets murky in the middle

"deserve" is a messy word and I don't like to use it

thing is we have limited resources (time, attention, supplies) and we're forced to make difficult decisions involving trade-offs

i've noticed that more than a few people prefer to abdicate responsibility vs taking ownership

I've written about my own experience working through this myself. It's very real that people would rather endure F outcomes + blame others/circumstances for it, than be personally responsible for getting a D or C outcome. And all of this gets meta and murky *fast*

it's generally considered impolite to over-scrutinize people's relative agency, capability, etc. in "peacetime", we have polite fictions where we pretend there aren't huge disparities in the influence that people have over outcomes

feels like we don't live in peaceful times rn

there's also often this knee-jerk assumption that anybody talking about things like agency and power must be some kind of sociopath or fascist. I... understand the association. People tend to struggle to separate wartime/peacetime mindsets, and so groups tend to hot-swap leaders

I don't mean to judge other people poorly for their imperfect handling of crises. It's certainly tempting to do that, but I know from experience that it doesn't make anything better. We have to receive people where they are and challenge them (meaning ourselves) to be better

If you read memoirs of soldiers – and even civilians living through wartime – a sort of recurring narrative violation that emerges is that people actually kinda miss the chaos. Bad times are horrible, but they also reveal who you can really count on https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/988605782307495936

I do not mean to romanticize war. As a soldier myself, I think the most important trait in a general is the desire to avoid war as much as possible, and who deeply appreciates that the fundamental point of strength is to *minimize* bloody outcomes

I think it's important to distinguish between "desire to avoid bad outcomes" and "cowardice". There's probably a similar tension between "desire to seek good outcomes" and "tyranny". It takes both courage and sensitivity to face reality artfully