Rules and Values and their Discontents

I read a comment recently about the rules for bidding on government contracts.  This isn’t the comment, but it gets at the same issue, which stuck with me:

US public entities are almost always required to select the lowest-price bid. This is sort of counter-intuitive, because you’d think that would result in lower costs. It doesn’t. It generally results in underbids and bad work, and public entities generally have a difficult time doing anything about it. But even if they could, the resulting inefficiency and waste of repairing and replacing substandard work will blow the budget every single time.

There’s an underlying problem here, and it’s a fundamental one: the vast, vast majority of rules - if not all of them - are not universally applicable.

In pretty much every endeavor, success results not from doggedly following the rules but from knowing the rules and knowing when not to follow them.  Sometimes it’s impossible to follow all the rules you ought to follow, because they come in to conflict.  Other times, a rule violates simple good sense, and you wonder if you ought to make an exception.  These aren’t easy decisions, precisely because there are no rules to follow.  It’s a judgment call.

I imagine some elements of government would run much more efficiently if we gave public servants greater leeway to make judgment calls, rather than strictly defining rules for them to follow.  But of course, these decisions have every chance of being biased.  And we are understandably wary of bias and corruption in our public servants.  It may be that an inefficient contracting system is a fair price to pay, to avoid a discriminatory or corrupt contracting system.

(Note: I do not think we have actually avoided a discriminatory or corrupt contracting system, but that’s another post.)

Groups outside of government have a bit more leeway when it comes to creating rules and enforcing them.  Business managers, school principals and boards, conference organizers, members of a co-op, open source software maintainers, parents, housing associations - everyone struggles with the question of what rules to make and how strongly to adhere to them.

In many of the organizations I’ve seen - and this could definitely be sample bias, a lot of my communities are very autonomy-minded - there’s a tendency to treat rules as guidelines, to explicitly encourage the individual to make judgment calls.

But what happens when you eschew binding rules - or when they were never an option in the first place?  It’s harder now to control and to judge people’s behavior.  How do you influence the system to get your desired outcomes?

You become value-oriented.  Values, unlike rules, are robust - they motivate behavior without dictating it.  A rules-based approach to a disobedient student might be to give them detention.  A values-based approach, conversely, might be to have a discussion with the student about why they’re acting out and what they’re unhappy about.  Someone who shares your values and who is skilled at maximizing them is the best possible proxy for making decisions that matter to you.

Unfortunately, values are difficult to measure.  You cannot tell how committed someone is to tolerance, or growth, or autonomy the same way you can tell whether or not they’ve followed the rules you’ve set for them.  Just because someone says they care about increasing diversity, or consumer privacy, or religious freedom, doesn’t mean that they care even slightly.

For small and marginalized movements, this problem is easier to deal with.  If it is unpopular to advocate for a particular value, then a person claiming that value is likely to be genuine.  Why else would they endure the social costs?

As movements become mainstream, though, the amount of empty talk and opportunism increases dramatically.  It’s no longer easy to trust that someone who says they share your values actually does.  At this point, then, there are two forms of recourse.

First, you can look at past behavior.  Has this person acted to carry out said value, even at cost to themselves?  Has this person been advocating this value long before it became mainstream?  This approach can stifle movement growth as newcomers are viewed with suspicion, and the past decisions of individuals used to pass judgment on their character.

Second, you can revert to rules.  You can forge from the burning, shapeless metal of your values a specific set of requirements that community members must follow.  “You say you care about openness?  Then freely license your software.”  “You say you care about diversity?  Then do blinded admissions/applications/proposals.”  But too-strict an adherence to rules has all the disadvantages outlined above.

There are, of course, no rules for when you should make rules, and no reliable method for assessing people’s values.  But it may be helpful to think explicitly about these approaches when trying to make decisions.  Human behavior, especially group behavior, is immensely complicated.  In the end, all we’ve got are our best guesses.