Bill Custer's thought sphere

When I’m in the checkout lane at the grocery store, or trying to get news online, it is inescapable to see celebrities, and that’s perfectly fine. I’d like to point out that a lot of folks really like certain celebrities. So we have rock stars of all kinds, including engineers on the leading edge of technology, the creatives and performers designing new music, art, and so on. We have sports heroes and star politicians.

And we have the homeless, the economically trapped people, the folks who can’t afford a doctor or dentist visit, or to get that cancer cut out. I want to tell you, we don’t have to feel guilty, ashamed or bad about anyone: ourselves, celebrities, or the people on the wrong side of the tracks. We don’t and not because we don’t care. It’s because of this:

We can’t have the rock stars if we don’t have the homeless. We can’t have the latest transplant surgery technology if we don’t have the schizophrenics. We can’t have the Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, etc., if we don’t have the chronic depressed or alcoholics that destroy their lives. We can’t have the greatest without having the worst too, and its simply the way it works. In fact, we actually owe a lot to those folks on the wrong side of the tracks, because if they didn’t exist, we simply wouldn’t have the big leaps from the greatest minds either. We must have both.

Situations have potential outcomes, and each has some probability of realization, and sometimes there is a wide ranging distribution of outcomes. This is true for the people’s lives that are in all of the situations in the world. What we can do is hope to skew the outcomes towards, so that the best ones become more likely. So we can have the best lives, best technologies, and best art and music. We can hope to skew the probabilities to best outcomes, plus we want to squeeze that curve around just the very best ones. We want to lower the probability of the worst cases. When we skew and squeeze, there are fewer losers, and a good example is how electricians have a much more safe job than back in the old days, and families aren’t losing so many loved ones to accidents. When we skew and squeeze, we still produce the very best and rarest outcomes that produce the Einstein and the Eisenhower.

Now we know: we can’t have the best, without having some suffer because there will always be that small bad tail of the curve. We can reduce how many are there, bad situation by situation, but there’s no way to take that tail to zero. If variable outcomes weren’t natural, we wouldn’t have the very best and rarest ones that create new boundaries and worlds, new branches of knowledge and new levels of awareness. When I think about the folks on the wrong side of the tracks (which of course could be me, and could still be me in the future), I know that if not for them, I wouldn’t have my iPhone or many nice things that improve all of our lives. So I have more reason to help them, because in a big way, they help us all. In a Big way, huge.

Let’s be grateful, and let’s get to work to make those bad situations better for all.