Temple Grandin on sensible rules

[nancylebov]

I see a lot of arguments about regulation, and most them seem to be about whether government regulation is good or bad--with some particular regulation being the stimulus for people (including me) saying the sorts of thing about regulation that they usually say.

I've seen little about what sorts of rules do or don't work, but Temple Grandin's _Animals in Translation_ (generally recommended for anyone who's interested in animals, emotions, mind-body interaction, or cool facts) has a very interesting section.

Temple Grandin is a high-functioning autistic who specializes in designing humane slaughterhouses. She invented an animal welfare audit for the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on the idea of finding a few key measurable facts which imply a lot about whether a facility is well-run. For example, if animals are limping, it might be a problem with their food, genetics, flooring, health, or treatment. If you enforce a limit on the amount of limping, then you don't have to have rules for all the factors that affect limping--you can just tell the farm owner to get the proportion of limping animals down.

She says that rules need to be few and clear enough to be comprehensible, to measure outputs (not inputs or paperwork), and to focus on big problems. The rules need ongoing enforcement, but a well-designed rule set makes enforcement relatively easy.

In her opionion, the problem is that verbally oriented people tend to make rules which are vague, unmanagably numerous, and not focused on relevent outcomes--she gives herself as an example of a visually-oriented person who's come up with an excellent rule system. I'm not sure that the real divide is verbal vs. visual. I suspect it's caring vs. not caring, though bad rules tend to make people not care.

Dog and cat breed standards might be an example of rules made by visual people which don't work out well, and which fail to be relevent to anything important.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think Temple Grandin is closer to being right about what makes people make good and bad rules. (though I think rules come out of such different situations that you can't say "all verbal" and "all visual" people do any one thing about making them)

There are very good, caring people who have a very hard time becoming schoolteachers. One of the reasons that happens is that they have a hard time with rules. The rules they make are hard to understand and hard to explain and hard to enforce. I'm not talking just about the "behavior" rules like "don't take the tables apart:" (I bet you didn't think there had to be a rule about that) I'm talking also about rules like grading and rules that explain the academic material.

I myself have a hard time making rules because what I want to do is to make a multi-dimensional map instead of a two-dimensional rule. It's hard to be aware of the difference, too, because multi-dimensional is how I think about everything. But I do know, because I've experienced it from the other side, that multi-dimensional maps are hard to follow when you're new to the territory. What you need is something simple, that helps you focus on what is important in that context and helps you ingore the distracting other stuff that doesn't relate to what's in hand.

The pug breed standard has recently changed because people were breeding dogs who would necessarily be disabled from the lack of snout. I saw a dog yesterday who was either half-pug or a product of the new standard, and the superiority of his snouted face was immediately obvious.

[twistedchick]

I suspect that in some cases the breed standards are designed to avoid certain at-that-time physical problems, and then go overboard in the other direction, creating other problems.

What I found remarkable about Temple Grandin's approach is that she genuinely looks at situations from the animal's viewpoint (including getting down to their level to see exactly what they're looking at in order to figure out why they react as they do.) Most people aren't willing to consider other people's viewpoints, let alone animals'.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

The inputs vs. outputs seems like the most important distinction to me. There's a lot of government rules I deal with which focus on the inputs because they're easy to measure, not because they're important.