immutable rules that apply to everyone reduces that discrimination (but obviously, the rules themselves can also be discriminatory)
This is the sort of basic compassion and humanity that needs to exist. Anything else would be cruel. This has always existed, and is increasingly made difficult by implementing systems that don't allow for these kind of exceptions. This is stripping regular normal people like that bus driver from their autonomy, and by extension, their humanity.
That the bus driver could possibly maybe perhaps be racist and wouldn't have extended that kindness if I had been non-white is an entirely separate matter. Forbidding kindness because some people could possibly maybe perhaps be racist is far far worse, and will affect everyone negatively.
1) They are famous for employing people straight from prison
2) Their tills are just calculators, no electronic connections, no stock control
3) The staff are allowed to give out freebies. Fix shoes for free for people who look like they need it. They will give you free dry cleaning if you have a job interview
4) They still somehow manage to be profitable and growing. There are at least 3 in my town alone.
5) The MD is a great prison reform campaigner, who just got given the job of UK prisons minister.
6) The one kpi they measure is an index of employee happiness.
You can be successful without strict rules. He has only two.
Here is his book
HAPPY INDEX HB: Lessons in Upside-Down Management https://amzn.eu/d/1PEfVqc
If you think about manual processes like standing in a line and talking to a clerk, you don’t necessarily have to start again from the beginning if there is a hiccup- the clerk can allow you to leave the line and go get the thing you need and then come back to the front, meanwhile serving other customers.
Computer software almost never even has this basic concession. If you spend 10 minutes filling out a form, and you get to a piece of information that is mandatory but you don’t have, the vast majority of systems will make you start over (sure you could just leave the window open but that logon session is gonna time out).
Flexibility makes the world a much more pleasant place even if it occasionally invites abuse. As a society we typically allow a small baseline of abuse in exchange for this flexibility, and we punish severe abuse to make sure the level stays tolerable.
But the other aspect is that flexibility is often pro-social. If you want flexibility you are strongly incentivized to be easy to deal with. If you are a jerk to everyone you will find a remarkable lack of flexibility.
The same situation with the bus driver would also never happen, they could easily get fired for allowing it. Train conductors even have to apologize for being early. There's also a lot more open racism and discrimination in various ways (example: drinking bar admittance or apartment rentals) and in various parts of their society that goes completely unpunished.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world
Their society comes at a heavy cost
The USA has a relatively high suicide rate and is famously not conformist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Lots of slack granted to foreigners who aren’t expected to know the rules. Lots of slack granted to Japanese people who are free to be normal, hikikomori, nerdy, NEET, sporty, etc. Slack to be and do whatever unless you bother someone.
It’s just slack you don’t really notice immediately unlike the menu stuff.
Foreigners might have some slack in some ways but in many ways it's quite the opposite... so there's both good and bad IMO.
"Free to be normal etc." I don't consider that slack either, that's just having a generic free society to me.
I think slack as well as rules can be systematically introduced to the system. Software lowers the cost to support "slack rules" (1 ride is free per year per human face).
And yes, giving people autonomy also means they can do bad things. And that's something we can live with, and it's far better than forbidding them from doing good things. Your distrust of people borders on the misanthropic.
This actually sounds interesting and I would be down to help pull off such a Herculean task.
But also no, this is lunacy. Not only 'itake would like to strip people of their autonomy, they'd also like to strip them from their capacity to do good? That's wishing us a fate worse than death.
Not that it's possible in practice anyway. It's a AGI-complete problem, and any lesser attempts are... well wake me up when any software system implements exceptions and slack around their rigid rules.
Ideally with some LLM tech (though I'm old enough to remember when Blockchain would have solved this problem)
/s
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race
Are Black 3x more likely to break to rules or do white students get 3x more slack?
These demands to eliminate any possibility of discrimination are shutting down institutions and gridlocking the society.
There's always someone that'll feel they're disadvantaged somehow - not just because of race or gender (the big, flashy topics), but also because the district they live in, or some minor accident, or any other reason. You try to equalize all that, you get systems that are hell to live through and don't even give you much for the trouble.
Also, you can hardly talk about kindness or other good traits and behaviors, in a world where you eliminate all space for showing it. Without slack, kindness is meaningless.
The trick to fixing discrimination is to have people not wish to discriminate and exert social pressure on others who might try. Trying to box in people who do evil with more bureaucracy and tighter and tighter rules is not sane.
Rules can only ever be effective if they reflect the culture of a community.
No; the long-term solution, hard as it is, is to gradually push society toward a point where that sort of systemic discrimination is viewed near-universally as anathema to justice and to the health of the society as a whole, and make more rules of the type where a clear principle is outlined, a rule is stated with the principle as its foundation, and the people identifying and enforcing rule violations are assumed to be able to use reasonable human judgement.
You would have to dispense with a lot of rules that seem like obviously good things because of the unintended consequences.
We could replace the term slack with freedom. We all like freedom. We write songs about how much we like it.
We must all be whipped into Utopia.