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March 19, 2006
Adaptation
Something struck me today, involving (incongruously enough) Sacagawea dollars and the war: people by and large really have no clue how to apply their own experiences to the world.
A lot of people gripe about the Sacagawea dollars. For example, Gerard van der Leun says:
People just don't like them.
Case in point: While waiting in line at the Laguna Beach Post Office to speak to a clerk, a woman came in and rustled to the front to ask a question. She was clutching this bronze object that at first glance seemed to be a quarter, but was of course the dreaded dollar coin. She'd been purchasing stamps from the PO's vending machine with paper money and had been given several dollar coins in change from the machine.She then decided that she needed a few more stamps and had tried to use the dollar coins. But of course the machine that gave them to her wasn't configured to accept them. This, needless to say, peeved her. But since today the US Post Office exists only to drive customers away and put itself out of business by 2010, the clerks only shrugged and went back to their SOP of imitating every slo-mo work film you've ever seen. The hapless woman interrupted them again and asked if she could please have some dollar bills for the coins so she could use the stamp machine. The clerk said, "We're not supposed to give bills for the coins, but we can give coins for the bills." There were about 12 people waiting in the snake line for the clerk and I think I saw each and every one slump down and despair at this perfect government employee epiphany. The woman just shook her head and made for the exit.
Yeah, OK, looking to the Post Office for a model of efficiency and common sense is not a very useful exercise. There's a reason for the aphorism "going postal", after all. And yes, it's stupid to have machines that dispense change they cannot accept. But the reality of the situation is this: what incentive do makers of vending machines, parking meters and so forth have to adapt their machines to take the dollar coins? After all, the last dollar coin went down in flames for good reason: it was too similar to a quarter for people to tell the coins apart at a glance, or a feel if they were blind.
But the Sacagawea dollar only intrinsically suffers from being difficult to spell. It's visually and tactilely distinct from other coins in US use, and thus is easy to identify at a glance. So why is it really not in use? Because of the catch 22: machine owners and makers won't adapt their machines until the coin is accepted, which won't happen until the coin is widely adopted.
The Federal Reserve could fix this, though, trivially: simply announce that dollar bills would not be printed after some period, say five years. This would give both time and impetus for manufacturers and operators to adapt, and would get people resigned to accepting the change in the nature of their money (a kind of change that every human everywhere feels opposed to almost by instinct). It would ensure that people have both time and motive to adapt. Instead, the Federal Reserve waits and waits for people to adopt the coin as the standard, while their dithering makes adoption less and less attractive to everyone.
Then there's this criticism of the government's — specifically, the military's — handling of the war in Iraq. (hat tip: Wretchard)
Three years on, the U.S. military is finally becoming adept at fighting a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Sadly, these are precisely the skills that should have been mastered before America launched its invasion in March 2003. It may prove one of the costliest lessons in the history of modern warfare.I had a chance to see the new counterinsurgency doctrine in practice here this week. U.S. troops are handing off to the Iraqi army a growing share of the security burden. As the Iraqis step up, the Americans are stepping back into a training and advisory role. This is the way it should have happened from the beginning.
What these two paragraphs mostly tell me is that David Ignatius has little clue of two things: what the military has been doing in Iraq for the last three years, and how his real world experience is applicable to others. Surely, Ignatius has found himself in the same position that I have, or that every person I've ever known appears to have, where their assumptions, training, life experience and so forth prepared them to react a certain way, but changed circumstances made that reaction inappropriate. Was he able, unlike every other person I've ever known, able to anticipate all changes to his life circumstances in advance, able to determine the ideal change to his behavior in advance, and able and willing to make those changes even when the events causing the changes hadn't yet occurred? If so, I nominate him for Saint, and recommend that he be killed as he is likely not actually human.
When a change comes, people adapt. But adaptation requires that people notice a change, and also requires time for them to make the adaptations. The Fed made the mistake of not making a noticeable change, and Ignatius makes the mistake of assuming that adaptation to change can be instantaneous and perfect. Neither seems to have any clue that the things that happen to them also happen to people who use money, in one case, or the military, in the other.
Like the Fed, Ignatius misses the fundamental point that human adaptation does not come prior to the need, and when the need comes, adaptation is not instantaneous. The Fed refuses to create the need in the public mind to match the Fed's desire to save money on making $1 tokens, and fails to see that without the public feeling a need to adapt, the public won't adapt. Ignatius fails to see both that the military could not have adapted to circumstances on the ground prior to those circumstances becoming apparently different from the military's expectations, and that having adapted, the adaptations would take time to make a difference in the wider war. (It's not as if — even if the military could have, in 2003, foreseen every event of the last three years correctly — the military could have created Iraqi leaders and units that could work together the way they have in Operation Swarmer in very much less time than has in fact elapsed.)
But then, failure to assume that one's own frustrations and setbacks are unique seems to be a common human characteristic.
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