Fitting Language Boxes, Behavioral Economics and the Systemic "Why"

AI rendering of Boxes. And also, are those sketches of reptile skins? :|

[Original article posted: January 6, 2025]

Ever feel like you've gotten boxed into a "death zone" by your company or industry?

You're not alone.

The company you work for wants you to perform a function. And that function must be communicated, so that the employer who calls that function understands enough about it to accept the transaction of what they're feeding into it and what they're expecting to get as a result.

If this sounds mechanized, it's because it is -- to an extent. But to what extent? How far can you go down this "I am a function" path before you stop being recognizably human? Laws stop helping with this at some point. As do corporate policies. You're on your own to stay human past a particular limit (unless you oddly find some type of mechanized nihilistic existence attractive, in which case you may believe humanity to be optional, a point of view that I find to be highly suspicious).

Communication of possible functional "fit" in a larger system involves the selection of words that describe the functional proclivity or operation of the self. But this depends on the availability of a vocabulary that is fitted to the task, and it can easily become self-defeating over time. For example, to complete the statement, "I am a ...," in preparation for an assessment of "fit", some people simply try to select words that will sell well, or cast themselves in a somewhat inaccurate but competitively favorable light, or don't really describe them well as a person, but are commonly understood. It's kind of like the words are these packages that you can just pull from a retail display case. For some people, these pre-fabricated words are exactly what they need to communicate themselves to others, but for others, they find a serious impediment in economic communication because they can't find pre-fabricated words that realistically articulate what they need to say, and so the communication suffers.

If there is no word to convey the sentiment and functionality of what is meant, then we have to make one.

One organizational danger is the failing to construct and maintain a vocabulary that accurately fits the sentiment and functionality of what the communications in the organization are intending to convey. When words are chosen for reasons of casting people all the time in the best possible light, or for the sake of politeness so as not to be disadvantaged in hiring or promotions or opportunities, or simply to avoid not appearing to be offensive or rude, and the conversation is fully incentivized for economic competitive gain, the effective vocabulary in use narrows. It becomes harder and harder to communicate certain things that people believe may not be well-received, eventually landing your organization in a condition where the sentiment and functionality of the people involved can never be fully or realistically communicated.

You descend at that point into an economic fantasy that has little or no grounding in the real economic functional behavior of the people who are supplying what you consume.

This is what I respected about the science of behavioral economics: There is this idea that you challenge your notions of how people functionally behave and make decisions by observing what real people actually do.

Roles and Limitations of Performance

The problem of communication becomes more difficult when you begin to feel limited by a description of "role", a role which is itself built out of a practically and artificially limited vocabulary as described above.

Us programmers understand "scripted" functional behaviors all too well. We have long noted the repetitiveness of human tasking in organizations, and have often wondered how far we could go with automating these tasks, supposing that we could build some dead machine to take care of all the order-following and rote execution of the repetitive script, because we ourselves are disgruntled at the very thought of following rote meaningless orders.

So if we succeed in making such a machine, we would be free to do... nothing. But then there is an economic problem: If payment is based on execution of rote and "role"-scripted orders, then it is the machine that becomes paid, and the the person who developed the machine risks becoming homeless.

Instructions and Challenges: Do You Where and Why?

Given these organizational diseases, it becomes necessary to be able to successfully challenge instructions. There must, therefore, be a basis along which an instruction may be challenged. Let me suggest 2 such bases.

Where does an instruction apply? That is, what is its environment or context of execution? An instruction that operates well in one context may be fatally flawed in another.

Why is the instruction there? That is, what is its purpose? An instruction that may fail to achieve the purpose for which it was intended is worth challenging.

It is interesting to note that the geographic sense of where is also appealed to in mathematics. Something that is true or present in one place or environment or context may be false or absent in another place or environment or context. I am not aware of a purposeful sense of why readily available in mathematics. Interestingly, I wonder if there is a good reason for that exclusion, or whether that is simply not developed for them yet, as it has been better developed for linguistics.

Conclusion

Because the lack of a "conclusion" feels, according to one English teacher I had, like "falling off a cliff". Anyway. The real conclusion here is perhaps that we need to get some reason and collective basis of thought process back into our organizations, because the alternative is to succumb to internal organizational-systemic failure. As much as I wanted to believe in the dream-job cushiness and fantasy economics I saw in many places, I just couldn't. I've seen so much failure already.