The Enemy of the Good

Hey, remember that time when I used to have a blog? That was fun, right?

So I’ve been a little too busy to write lately. Not in a “working” sense of busy, but… every since the smoke rolled into the Okanagan I haven’t been able to run. So I’ve been walking instead… usually two-three hours every day. That’s lots of time to listen to podcasts, not a lot of time to write.

As a consequence I now have a big backlog of things I want to write about, so today will be sort of a theme and variations. Today’s theme is the nirvana fallacy. This fallacy is best explained by aphorisms. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” “Give them the third best to go with, the second best is too late, the best never comes.” “Striving to better, we oft mar what’s well.”

I regularly read a web forum that has a tendency to pick fights in pursuit of ideological purity. It’s a fairly small forum… such groups are inevitably small, because they exclude people that would be close allies but for one little flaw. It can be infuriating to watch groups of good people split or self-destruct. I personally don’t comment there much, because sometimes it seems like anything I post is likely to offend someone somehow… and it’s so much easier to not post there than to be continually apologising. It’s still worth reading, but it would be dangerous to take it too seriously.

I think this is closely related to the tendency of political parties to go to the extremes. Take the current Republican primaries in the US, for example. Jeb Bush isn’t a pure conservative, because he is seen as weak on immigration. Rand Paul is seen as weak on social issues, Ben Carson is too weak on abortion… so each candidate is pushing all the others farther and farther to the right.

You see the same on the left, of course, all the time, though the party nominations are obscure enough that it tends to play out in general elections. So the Liberals and Greens are attacking the NDP for not being left enough, the NDP is attacking the Liberals and Greens for not being left enough… oddly, the Liberals and Greens are tending to not attack each other, probably because the NDP is the front runner right now.

I’m not by any means immune to this tendency, just because I know about it. That’s not how cognitive biases work. In politics, Thomas Mulcair was actually my very last choice for the NDP leadership, I think 10th on my ballot. His selection was very much a deliberate choice by the party to go with mainstream electability over ideological purity. This is what makes the attacks on him for having a background with Quebec provincial liberals and negotiating with the Federal conservatives about joining so funny… those were well known at the time, and part of why he was chosen.

This fallacy doesn’t just play out on grand political scales, of course. It’s everywhere. I probably could have easily written six new additions to my ongoing “Too Tired to Write” series, each with maybe one or two jokes cribbed from my facebook posts, and that would have been better than writing nothing at all. But that wouldn’t be perfect, so it didn’t happen.

Maybe I ought to try doing that tomorrow. Just because I might not have time to write an in-depth analysis of an important topic doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do anything at all.