The Great Web
Coupling for Decouplers
Here’s a well-known thought experiment:
A trolley is headed down a track, and you’re standing at the switch. You get to decide which of two tracks the trolley goes down.
There are five people tied to one of the tracks, and one person tied to the other.
You have to decide which track the trolley goes down.
What do you do?
Instead of addressing the experiment, ask yourself: what’s my first instinct? Do you accept the thought experiment as I’ve presented it to you, or do you demand more information? Do you want to know who these people are and how they got to be tied up on a trolley? Or maybe you want to know why you’re the one who has to decide this. Where is everyone else?
Before deciding whether or not five people survive the passing trolley or only one, maybe you have more questions.
Perhaps some of the people tied to the trolley deserve to die, and others don’t? Or perhaps the five people are all old, and the individual is a child?
Or maybe you reject the notion of the thought experiment altogether, refusing to give an answer to a clearly manufactured question.
Coupling and Decoupling
If you’re like me, you’re willing to take the thought experiment at its word. Without knowing anything else, the best thing to do is save the five at the expense of the one. My brain naturally considers this situation - and many others - in isolation, hewing to the rules that have been set and ignoring any other context.
But there are plenty of people who aren’t like me, who see context in everything and refuse to distinguish between a situation and every detail that makes it the way it is. These people might refuse to answer the trolley problem, arguing that without context, it’s a meaningless situation dreamt up by academic hacks.
These two modes of thinking can be referred to as decoupling and coupling.
Decoupling refers to when a mind considers something in isolation.
Coupling refers to when a mind considers something in its full context.
The trolley problem is a toy example of the difference between a coupler and a decoupler. Let’s try out a real example.
A man kills another man with a gun in a confrontation. The perpetrator’s guilt is not in question; there is clear security footage of him killing the victim while the victim was running away from him (ruling out self-defense).
Based on the testimony of all involved and the footage, it’s also clear that this was in no way premeditated; the victim and the perpetrator didn’t know each other before the confrontation.
What should the sentence be?
As a decoupler, my natural inclination is to look at the situation in isolation, look at the relevant law - second-degree murder seems correct, as it was intentional but not premeditated - and be done with it.
A coupler, on the other hand, would want to know a whole lot more about the situation before making any kind of judgement. Who was the perpetrator? Who was the victim? What led to the confrontation? How did the perpetrator get the gun? In the perpetrator’s culture, what’s the normal response to confrontation?
And even more: what led the perpetrator down this path in life? Are they likely to do this again or not? What’s the sentence for 2nd degree murder, and is it a good fit for what the perpetrator did? Is there any possibility of rehabilitation?
Coupling vs. Decoupling
Is it better to couple than to decouple? No.
Neither is better or worse than the other - they can be thought of as distinct cognitive modes, or alternate tools one can deploy. I think people naturally lean towards one over the other, the same way that some people naturally lean towards the sciences while others prefer the humanities.
That being said, there are absolutely domains where it is better to couple or decouple.
Science, engineering, and programming all naturally lend themselves to decoupling. In each field you want to lay out your goals and constraints, then isolate your variables and test them all individually. These complicated non-human systems are best understood by looking at each piece by itself before combining them into a synthesized understanding.
Justice, psychology, and politics are all fields that are naturally coupled. Each deal with people who shouldn’t be reduced to isolated variables. Each deal with large contexts of history that intertwine and relate to other things. How can you understand a person’s psychology without knowing their past? How can you say what is just and what isn’t, if you don’t understand the context from which crime emerges? How can you hope to grasp how power is allocated, if you don’t understand what people respond to and what they don’t, their hopes and fears and basic needs?
As a natural decoupler, I’ve struggled to understand how the other side sees the world. Couplers will agonize over the complexities of things that seem simple and straightforward to me, insisting on reams of context that don’t alter the facts in the slightest. It was all very confusing for a long time, mostly because I lacked the conceptual handle necessary to think like a coupler.
I have recently gained said handle, and I’d like to share it.
The Great Web
I call it The Great Web.
Imagine a graph (graph theory graph) where nodes represent things and edges the connections between them.
The Great Web is the representation of how everything connects to everything else. Everything and everyone are nodes on this graph. A human being is a node, with links connecting them to everyone they’ve ever known, and further links connecting them to their greater community, their country, their ethnicity, and every other conceivable group to which they belong. They’re connected to the items they own and the work they do and the stores they shop at and the social media they post in. Everything they eat and drink, every movie they’ve ever watched or book they’ve ever read, and on and on it goes, a near-infinite series of connections that encompass that person’s life.
The Great Web connects things through time as well as space - a person is connected to their past and future, all the things they’ve ever done or could ever do. We can’t see a person’s history trailing behind them in the air but in the Great Web that history is plain to see, a cord of connections reaching back in time from the person to their childhood, their adolescence, to every experience that made them who they are.
If it seems overwhelming to think about, well, it is - which is why I never try to envision the entire Great Web at once (if I do try, all I get is a headache). Instead I envision a single node, then spread my awareness out around it, feeling for the closest and strongest connections, glancing backwards in time to see what they used to be and observing them change as the person’s life goes on.
This all might seem very abstract, so let’s apply it to the situation from before. Remember that the Great Web is a mental tool that I - a natural decoupler - use to couple, to think about the context of things beyond the immediate.
A man kills another man with a gun in a confrontation. The perpetrator’s guilt is not in question; there is clear security footage of him killing the victim while the victim was running away from him (ruling out self-defense).
Based on the testimony of all involved and the footage, it’s also clear that this was in no way premeditated; the victim and the perpetrator didn’t know each other before the confrontation.
What should the sentence be?
Since we’re sentencing the perpetrator, we start with his node in the Great Web. Immediately we see a mass of connections, thin strands uniting his node with the nodes of others. We can see his family (just a mother, no siblings), his friends, his job, and so on. What stands out? Maybe his home life growing up was violent. Maybe the culture he’s connected to is one which prizes personal pride and not taking disrespect from anyone. He’s American, so access to firearms is relatively easy, legally or illegally.
His testimony alleges that the victim was insulting him before fleeing when he drew his gun. There’s a standard in the law about what counts as incitement - saying something so offensive to someone that they lash out - and given our perpetrator’s history, we can make a judgement about what the level of incitement was and if we think it’s sufficient to mitigate his guilt somewhat.
We can look back in time through the Great Web for other instances of violence, provoked or unprovoked, and to see if the perpetrator has otherwise been a law-abiding member of society. Is this someone who was provoked beyond all reason and answered with violence in a single instance, or someone who regularly gets into fights over childish taunts? Is he connected to other victims? We can then judge whether or not, if he was released today, he’ll likely wind up killing someone again.
We can also look at his connections in the Great Web to determine what the consequences of sentencing him will be. Are there nodes close by that will suffer if he goes to prison for a decade or more? Is he supporting a family? Is his mother old and infirm?
What about recidivism? When he gets out of prison, if his social connections and life look the same then as they do now, how likely do we think it is he’ll kill someone else? Or is his node in the Great Web so sparsely connected, so absent of community, that we should suspect putting him in prison will only increase his connections law-breaking individuals and reinforce his cultural inclination to respond to insults with violence?
Looking through his history, is this someone that we should expect to understand that violence, especially lethal violence, is not the answer to insults? Was he taught right from wrong at any age? What were the defining moments of his life - did he learn that insults and disrespect were dangerous because appearing weak led to people attacking you? Or was he simply prone to fits of anger throughout his life?
A coupler would include all of this and more in their judgement. While he’s guilty of the crime and the law is clear, there is substantial leeway for both judge and jury to interpret how this particular case goes, and so all of these questions should be factors in the final decision.
Conclusion
The Great Web doesn’t exist in the sense that you can point to it. It’s a conceptual handle, a way of thinking and talking about the world that allows me to visualize the invisible connections we all share. It’s a way to take the ineffable and make it explainable. Referencing The Great Web is referencing the way that actions, thoughts, emotions, and history ripple outward from person to person. It’s a way to understand how a tragedy befalling one person might impact a community, or how the injustice inflicted upon a people can affect a single person.