Things I've learned, part N: sometimes things are complicated

Particularly, when someone tries to tell you a thing that seems complicated is actually simple, be wary.

This happens in TED talks, Malcolm Gladwell books, and all sorts of other pop science fluff. "We thought that teaching kids/building livable cities/addiction/etc was very difficult, but then we found this one weird factor that explains 90% of everything!" See also: diets, politics.

It's not always wrong. I guess we used to think scurvy was complicated, then we kinda accidentally discovered Vitamin C. But nowadays we've solved most of the simple problems, and so anything that's still around is probably complex. "X is actually simple" is usually wrong, and seductively so: it's kind of terrifying to deal with a ridiculously complicated world, so of course we're always looking for ways to simplify it.

I don't remember what prompted this in particular, but it does come up a lot. Maybe something political? "Immigrants are taking our jobs" is a popular one. So is "Obama was bad because X, therefore everything he did was also bad." (or even "Trump is bad, therefore..." - though most things he's done have been bad :-/ )

I want to be a Mechanical Turk activist.

(Amazon Mechanical Turk)

By this I mean, I want someone else to be able to call me up and say "call City Supervisor X and say 'I support Bill Y'", and then I do it. I don't want to have to watch all the bills coming in, find the ones that I support, research their backstory, learn what they really mean, and finally make one call. That's hours of work for one call. I want to spend one minute for one call. Or one hour for one showing-up-at-local-planning-meeting. I spend my whole working life doing research, I don't have mental energy to research a bunch of political things every week too.

This seems obvious, but it also seems very hard to do. There are mailing lists, but it's hard to get on the right mailing list (that will send you direct calls to action, and only direct calls to action). I'm on a couple: Indivisible and the SF YIMBY party seem pretty good at this. Make this kind of mailing list, and I will beat a path to your door.

(A step even further/better would be if I could delegate my voice. I want to be able to join the SF Bike Coalition, say, and whenever the SF Bike Coalition supports Thing X, they can automatically count me with them. I guess they get this a little bit by having big membership rolls, but I want to make a stronger kind of membership: "I explicitly agree with everything y'all do and say." (Ideally this comes with a weekly reminder email or something, so I can withdraw my voice-delegation if the organization starts to go off the rails.))