Raising the Agency Waterline

What if the average person was slightly more sane?

This is the premise of Raising the Sanity Waterline.

Now, what that writer might consider insane and what you consider insane are two different things- but the premise stands.

What if the average person was better about checking the predictive power of their beliefs?

However…

The sanity waterline is about ‘predicting rain’.

What does it take to build an ark?

That’s where agency comes in.

The ability to act on decisions.

This isn’t without tradeoffs.

If we increased agency for the average person tomorrow without increasing sanity, you’d get more crime.

Agency only works well for people when it’s paired with thinking over a longer timeframe.

So how do we encourage it?

We can start by celebrating wins, rather than booing failures.

Understanding that every successful exploitation requires thousands of unsuccessful explorations- failures. Losses.

Looking at my infant learn, I can see him grabbing at things.

Using his voice.

Each might be deemed a “failure” against what we know adults do- but there’s no way he’s learning to walk without first learning the limits of what a hand can do.

Raising the Agency Waterline happens when people are allowed to fail, over and over again.

When they’re free to play.

We can do this by making environments where the cost of failure is not colossal.

In fact, we want to setup as many reversible decisions as possible- while keeping the game as close to the thing we’re training for as possible.

In unarmed fighting, that might be sparring.

If we’re teaching kids to drive, that might be starting early with a go-kart.

Or with bicycles, something like this:

Lemonade stands.

Some land to learn to grow plants with.

Whatever it is, it will need more acceptance of failure in learning than what we have now.