Quality makes the difference

Higher quality means more useful

Quality is a word that denotes the difference between A and B. It denotes the specific characteristic that one thing has, and the other thing does not have.

Value on the other hand is about usefulness. Food is inherently, singularly, useful to humans as it sustains our lives. High quality food is more useful than than low quality food because it does it more effectively. That is how quality and value live together.

Quality is about comparison

Whole foods, saturated fats, beans and nuts.

Value can exist with a singular thing, and quality can only exist in abundance.

Abundance

Quality is at the heart of living in a world with any choices. It is a word that is used to distinguish, what activities and segments of living provides more value, and what less. A way to reason about other actors in your life.

Given an abundance of styles to live and abundance of different things in the world, quality is the ultimately one key aspect of seeing the differences around us.

When people talk about quality they start with first hand experience, observations and anecdotal evidence. Their first impressions, prejudice and quick judgement construct the set pieces. They use various thinking processes, some logical and others that might be more subtle as actors. Their values, expectations, current level of economic well-being, culture and acquired benefits set the stage. And these all play a part to form something that resolves into qualitative thinking. Thinking about the difference of something.

The conglomerates will make sure to influence these thoughts every step of the way and the worst outcome is that all you are capable to distinguish is the utterly trivial and localized.

Being so complex and subjective, it is no wonder that it gets muddied up.

Quality is about figuring out what makes a difference

Problem is, that we humans have some trouble distinguishing what makes a difference, and we do get it mixed up. We can get too focused on the surface level games to understand what things are actually useful and forward pushing.

For earth not to end up in a ball of fire, we should, for example, care if human life is wasted as that is our only real capital. We should care, if the land is exploited as that is the only inheritance we got and the only one we’ll for sure pass on. We should care about humanity’s sustainability as it is only ours to lose. We should care about our fellow humans and the way they think, as they simply cannot be sustainably “cancelled”. These are all our problems, and nobody else will come and take care of them for us.

For earth not to end up in a ball of fire, we should at least, agree on something.

Understanding differences between things and seeing them is necessary for getting your priorities straight in life. We should care about educating our fellow humans more than if the latest Macbook Pro can render 8k video in record time. I’m not saying these things are mutually exclusive, but I am saying that it is increasingly easy to lose sight of what priority order things in your life need to be in.

Blind to the difference is blind consumerism

Quality and differentiating also relates to production and consumerism deeply, as it nowadays always has abundance.

Given that any production can have anywhere from 1 to 10000 qualities that distinguishes it from the other production, you have no choice but to be selective and aware of the few things that make the biggest difference.

Most people will fall into a trap of assigning value only to immediate performance metrics between two productions. Something being higher performance than something else is only higher quality in one relevant axis. If it requires child labor to achieve those metrics - it should become problematic. This comes back to the “we should agree on something” idea.

We choose often to avert our eyes from a big chunk of relevant qualities. We might, for example, forget to consider that technology has other quality metrics than performance such as exploitation of natural resources and people. We can forget to care that game development has other quality metrics than FPS, visuals, price and game length such as exploitation of people. We can also, fully fail to appreciate that AI ultimately can equally create destruction as it can democratize and lift up those who are less well off.

We do spend unsustainable energy in copious amounts to calculate hashes to generate a bunch of files on a disk to create cryptocurrency. But we forget that we also always have the choice to not do this.

We can fall trap to thinking narrowly of these things, when we should remind ourselves to take a wider look.

One thing though is clear; when it comes to quality thinking, we are direly lacking!

Money makes the world go round

Ultimately the problem of not being able to distinguish in the 2022 state of abundance of “all things” from social media to production to information could boil down to the fact that humans are far too unsophisticated to filter in this kind of abundance. We are not educated to deal with this or we are simply too unevolved for a data challenge of this magnitude. All our tools help us produce, but very little of our tools help us distinguish - especially if we are underprivileged.

Corporations play the field and they are most often massive conglomerates of individuals who move an incredibly quantity of capital around the world and the money they operate with go on to do a disproportionately large amount of the harmful and positive things that happen today. Uninformed people hold all the power but they have no idea that they do:

When you work in a company, you line the pockets of someone else because the work you do is ultimately always going to disproportionately produce money for someone else than yourself. It also means, that unless you are a millionaire, the work you do has a much larger impact to the world than the money you spend day to day.

Therefore, if you are on the production side you must make sure that the things that you produce are somehow more useful or less exploitative than whatever is already out there - preferably even when casting a very wide perspective net.

Given that, if your company makes a bad decision, and that decision does not stop at you - then where else can it stop? It should be able to stop many times, ideally, but you should also never be so unengaged and/or uninformed, as to just do what is told.

It is also typical, that the people who execute these decisions are paid moderately at best, and their decisions can go on to generate massive amounts of revenue and that revenue can, at worst, go on to do a massive amount of harmful things. I don’t think, for example, that the person at Volkswagen who programmed the cars to cheat in emission tests, was paid a lot of money. I don’t think that that person knew the power they possessed and I don’t think most people today understand their part in the power hierarchies they hold through their work.

I say that you must understand your role in this and the power that you hold, even when the money you get does not reflect this.

I would argue that the amount of wide bandwidth thinking you do, directly correlates with how much you are able to stand out as well in a positive sense. Being able to see what the world lacks is critical. Being able to see what makes the world worse is a must. Being able to think about the systems you participate in is important. Therefore, thinking is the currency that buys a more fulfilling life. To be able to be different in a useful way also requires copious amounts of creativity, knowledge and understanding. It unfortunately also requires saying no to a great deal of immediately attractive short term gains.

Most painfully, to know what makes a difference requires having some sense of internal direction. What drives you, what makes you smile, what drives you mad.

And remember, that as long as you can’t see the difference and as long as you have no priorities for yourself, is as long as you can be made to commit any atrocity. And that is why thinking about qualities really matters.

Why you should question your thinking about quality

Anyone working in corporate needs to be very aware of the power they have, because the work you do can generate a lot of money for someone else and you are ultimately in at least partial control of how that money creates things in the world. While you may not have Bezos money, you might the person who makes some miniature-Bezos their money and in that, you play a bigger role than you do as the average consumer.

Quality has no meaning in any context, unless you expand your vision to a more fuller accounting of what part you play and what priorities you have in life.

The marketing and the machinery around capital aims to make sure, that the difference you are able to distinguish becomes as marginal and localized as possible.

However, it should in your interest to make sure that this does not happen. Being a consumer is unavoidable and it becomes that you must be informed of what your contributions go on to do. If you work in production, like most of us do, then you must understand the systems that you partake in and how to navigate all that without making the world worse.