13 Reader Views on Dysfunction

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers to opine on the dysfunction that they see in the world, or to spotlight something that works well, even though, as John Gall writes in The Systems Bible, we owe sympathy to “anyone who struggles to take in this hard and humbling lesson––that error is our existential situation and that our successes are destined to be temporary and partial.”

Herb probably finds that too pessimistic. He writes:

I would submit that your perceptions of “dysfunction all around us” are somewhat skewed. We all live in a highly complex world, and each of our lives depends on so many things functioning more or less correctly, without much notice from us, that it is hard to know where to start when attempting to describe them all. Common perceptions of vast dysfunction are primarily caused by the following factors.

• The global extent of our awareness, based on so many digital-media sources.
• The natural tendency to focus attention on the anomalies: the dysfunctions, if you will.
• The varied set of criteria that we use to measure function and dysfunction. As just one example, Amazon functions very well when it comes to delivering things that I want to my doorstep in a timely fashion, but do they function well as an employer? Perhaps not so much.