Two of my favorite individuals in the world are Dr. Milton Friedman and Dr. Gregory House. Friedman pretty much rocked my worldview when he said, "
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." House amuses me when he says things like, "Dying people lie too. Wish they'd worked less, been nicer, opened orphanages for kittens. If you really want to do something, you do it. You don't save it for a sound bite." I suppose it's because both have a way of simplifying relatively complex phenomena into one liners that I can digest pretty easily. But a question that I'm intrigued by is how their different approaches reveal different views on what constitutes platinumness.
Friedman, as the quote above suggests, obviously has a respect for the processes and knowledge required to make good decisions, although he'd be the first one to assume his lack of knowledge about any number of things. At the same time, if you spend millions of dollars and have pretty much nothing to show for it, whatever your claim is about the desired end result, it calls into question your ability to understand whether you understand the root causes of said phenomena and going one step further, calls into question whether or not the said problem is even a real "problem" as it is described. Under what I believe is Friedman's line of reasoning, platinum behavior is derived from a mixture of understanding how good premises lead to good processes which then lead to better ends for everyone.
House, on the other hand, has a much more fun way of deciding platinum behavior; Do the ends get accomplished? Usually, his end is quite simple; save the patient at all costs. The means by which this is accomplished are completely irrelevant. Through this analysis, House disregards conventions like meeting with the patients his team treats, being nice to people, and following any sort of hospital protocol. It's an alluring way to live, although the assumption all along is that House will eventually solve the problem. When he doesn't, and I've only seen two episodes in five years where this has happened (both of which involved team members, not House, making mistakes) it throws his whole analysis into a bit of turmoil, because it reveals that there are limits to the kind of success one can have with such a methodology. At the same time, the show is a testament to a weird kind of American individualism that could give a flying fuck what conventions are, mainly because they are designed and implemented not for the benefit of the individual, but so that most people will not have to actually grapple with reality as House sees it - "Everyone lies." Thus, the logic goes, if results (saving lives) are the only thing that matters, why even pretend to care about all these things that seem to gray the clear truth that awaits when cold reason works it's way through a problem.
So the question remains about platinum behavior. Is it an end (House) or is more of a means that leads to positive ends (Friedman)? Obviously, I find both approaches attractive. But being neither brilliant nor a malcontent (at least right now), it is difficult to implement either approach in my daily life. Instead, I'll apply the ideas of both men in the best way I know how: watching my favorite tv show on
hulu and reading
books by a nobel prize winner.
Posts
