I want prosecutors, public defenders, lawyers and judges in our courtrooms. I want Representatives and Senators in Congress. The actors can stay in Hollywood.
How is a Congressman supposed to negotiate on a bloody camera? That’s bad craft, you don’t negotiate that way, you don’t get anything done and we haven’t. Congress hasn’t and they’ve long let the White House run the show, bought into Nixon’s BS about being coequal branches when Congress used to reign supreme.
Courts have a similar problem, if you have the public and the Republic breathing down their necks the whole time, how is a good Judge, Jury, Prosecutor and Defense supposed to bring justice with all of the details aired out to the public in such a visceral and relatable form? You want to know the facts of the case, you can go there in person or read the damn documents, and the people that need to know will put in the legwork. There’s no need to make every trial into a YouTube video.
It has nothing to do with video (although the fidelity of recording likely has an impact). It's now know as the Hawthorne effect [1] but even before it was given a name, anthropologists who came to openly study remote tribes often reported markedly different cultural behaviors from more clandestine anthropologists and the locals whose contact with the remote tribes brought them to the attention of academics.
Just knowing that something is being closely observed and even recorded for posterity seems to significantly alter behavior. Basically like a possum playing dead, except with far more complex social interactions.
The citation doesn't seem to support much of anything:
> Descriptions of the well-known and remarkable effect, which was discovered in the context of research conducted at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant, turned out to be fictional.
> The original research involved workers who made electrical relays at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric plant in Cicero, Illinois. Between 1924 and 1927 the famous lighting study was conducted. Workers experienced a series of lighting changes in which productivity was said to increase with almost any change in the lighting. This turned out not to be true.
> Later interpretations such as Landsberger's suggested that the novelty of being research subjects and the increased attention from such could lead to temporary increases in workers' productivity. This interpretation was dubbed "the Hawthorne effect," although the data does not support that view.
> Other researchers have attempted to explain the effects with various interpretations. J. G. Adair warned of gross factual inaccuracy in most secondary publications on the Hawthorne effect and that many studies failed to find it.
Despite this seeming like a classic case of conflating correlation with causation, and the workers simply being more productive due to being more rested.
The psychologists then concluded that although this wasn’t evidence for the Hawthorne effect, the effect was still real. I turned off the radio.
All media has this effect of turning things into a simulated spectacle but video is likely worse because it's unmediated and real-time.
This tendency of turning everything into a movie, available to consumers at the click of a button permeates American society at this point, from protests[1], to hearings, to the presidents medical status.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
There was a question here in another thread "if you saw your surgeon reviewing a text book just before he started cutting you up, would you feel more or less safe?". I would feel less safe.
But it's obviously better if those surgeons who don't feel 100% confident do review.
This 1000 times. I learned extremely early there is great value to be found in being "the strategic dunce" in the room in any Engineering context, and it is the most difficult 'skill' to teach to Junior Quality people.
When you get a bunch of Engineers in a room, you can often follow what they think is going on, and if you only observe and question shallowly, everything appears fine.
Then you play the dunce and ask them to clarify a basic point. Do it once. Do it twice. Do it a third time. Usually by 3 or four, unless planning has gone off without a hitch, you'll uncover some misunderstanding or assumption someone made, but the rest weren't aware of.
It doesn't take much, just a willingness to hold people to make what they think explicit. It can seem like a tiresome practice, but by doing it, you can also short-circuit the pattern by which everybody delegates a complete understanding of the system to 4 or 5 people, and you start to have everyone able to delve into the details of larger and larger swathes of the system, reducing the chances of only discovering fundamental holes in understanding until it's too late.
I find 80% time investment making sure everyone is saying the same thing about the same thing any day; since at that point, the implementation basically lays itself out in front of the mind's eye,and you turn the builders into walking cross-check functions.