Change

 

Crown of Creation

Life is change
How it differs from the rocks
I've seen their ways too often for my liking
New worlds to gain
My life is too survive
And be alive for you

If life is change, I may have to accept change, but do I have to like it??

I am old enough, and set enough in my ways,  to understand that some changes may be inevitable, but they are not always welcome.  Changes mostly come from the young, and when elders have complained about the young throughout recorded history they may actually be complaining about change.  But there are different aspects of change.  One aspect is the change itself.  The other aspect is the rate of change.

Liberals and conservatives often differ on how change is considered.  Liberals are often perceived to be more open to change, while conservatives resist change.  But this may be the only magnitude of the change.  What is the probability of the change? How much of a change is it?

Also important is the period over which the change is going to happen.  Some changes happen over geological time, like continental drift, while others appear to be instantaneous, like avalanches or landslides.  If the North American plate is getting farther from the Eurasian plate at a rate of 0.25 inches/year, that is an interesting aspect of continental drift. But if one is planning a trip from North America to Europe that will take less than a month, it probably can be ignored.  On the other hand a landslide is also a change, but it happens over a very short period and is not easily ignored.

Complaints about a change, e.g. the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, should be separated from the rapidity of that change.  We might, or might not, have influence on neither the change, nor the period over which that change occurred.  The only difference between evolution and  revolution is that the first is a gradual change and the second is a rapid change.

One of the three dimensions of the proposed framework for human behavior: Rights (User Optimal) versus Duty (System Optimal) also needs to be considered.  A User has a finite lifetime which is typically much, much shorter than the System’s lifetime.  If the change does not happen in the User’s lifetime, but if it does happen in the System’s lifetime, that does not mean that the change does not happen, just that change might not be considered in the User Optimal. Any costs associated with mitigating that change would be resisted by those who only think of their User Optimal solution.