94. Chump Checks

If only things worked properly. If only there was a simple straightforward way to tell if something or someone were worth the effort to interact with. If only people and institutions and shops could be trusted to be honest. They cannot. That is the simple truth, and it is there to be lived. So how do we deal with that painful truth?

There's a class of test I run, and that I recommend your running, when I want to evaluate an eatery of some kind. For any given class of eatery, there's a fairly standard menu item or three that you can pick to evaluate the quality of the establishment as a whole. For ice cream shops, it's three things: vanilla ice cream, strawberry ice cream, and lemon sorbet. Vanilla ice cream tells you about the quality of their ice cream base and whether they skimp on pricier ingredients, lemon sorbet is simple and clean and hard to hide anything behind, and strawberry is delicate and complex, easy to spot artificiality in. For breakfast-type places, I pick french toast - hard to get right, easy to do wrong - and eggs benedict-class dishes (e.g. eggs florentine), to see how well they do bearnaise sauce and poached eggs, both notably delicate and impossible to make lots of to keep warmed. For Korean restaurants, fried dumplings and kimchi both tell me a lot about the quality of the restaurant - fried dumplings must be be individually crafted, and the makeup of dumpling filling is deceptively subtle and unstandardized, and there's an entire arc of kimchi's freshness from overmild and salad-grade all the way to so sour it'd be best stewed instead; how well do they do at keeping their core ingredients fresh? For massage places, I tend to look for an actual understanding of physiology - in Chinese places in particular, I look for a knowledge of accupuncture not because I think it does much, but as a proxy for knowledge and dedication.

What about institutions? It's a little harder to find the same kind of explicit test, given how hostile powerful institutions are to being probed and tested and held to account, and how vindictively unpleasant they can be if you try. All the same, I find it helpful to keep track of what the functionaries are like - mostly, whether they seem to be - trying, invested at all, whether there is the clear spark of sapience there - as well as precisely how much needless bullshit they force you through and what their attitude towards it is. Being illegible as a person has given me a lot of that as well - having a mailing address that isn't my residence, and having both repeatedly moved in the last decade and not held any conventional jobs in that time; academics and grant-funded research decidedly don't count.

I call this sort of intrinsic and implicit test a chump check, after a similar concept in poker. A person or an institution passes or fails a chump check just by nature of who or what they are, what their standard procedures are, and how well they carry out everyday tasks and interactions. Everyone is surrounded by the interfaces and systems that they have built; other entities interacting with those interfaces unavoidably leaks information about themselves. A pebble falls into a lake; learn about the pebble from the size of the slash and the ripples it leaves. The only question is whether you've set up that system to be sensitive to and make use of that information.

This operates on an interpersonal level, too. Will someone respect you and your boundaries without constant enforcement? Hard to say. You certainly can't just ask them. But what you can do is pay careful attention to how they engage with you. It's not even like you're setting up horrible little secret tests of character - you're just doing your usual, being who you are, liking what you like and feeling what you feel, and noticing how people and institutions treat you.

Here's a few of my chump checks. Yes, I'm aware that just as all the above are Goodhartable if they're too widely known, these might end up being less effective chump checks now that I've mentioned them. So this isn't remotely all of my chump checks; just a few of the most notable:

• I pay attention to what people say about my wizard hat. Do they compliment it? Do they ask to try it on, or ask me where to get one? Do they ask if I'm a wizard? Or do they crack jokes about it? Do they pattern match to Harry Potter or Gandalf or the Sorcerer's Apprentice or D&D; do they get up in my face telling me to cast Fireball? Or do they shout after me that sorcerers won't be permitted into the Kingdom of Heaven?
• I pay attention to what people say when I tell them I'm a doctor of math. Do they get curious about the topic and ask me for an explanation suitable for laypeople? Do they start chattering about inside baseball in math? Or do they tell me that they've always hated math, hated it since high school or since calculus in college?
• I pay attention to names. I give them the choice of a normal-sounding wallet name and a strange but decidedly pronounceable chosen name. Do they try to pronounce the chosen name, or do they mess it up or crack a joke about it? Do they pick the wallet name, or the chosen name, or ask which I prefer? My full wallet name doesn't look to match my ethnicity: do they look around in confusion for me?

All of these little probes are about the same general sort of thing: will they respect me, even if I'm not enforcing that respect? Will they treat me well, knowing relatively little about me? Will they acknowledge my boundaries, or will they immediately start to overstep? Will they treat me as a person in my own right and seek to know me, or will they pattern match me to some picture in their head and move on?

There's a feeling there to these little checks, these careful tripwires and shields that I've found to be necessary through hard experience. There's a disgust there, for the exhaustingly many people who won't respect that presentation, who'd rather not bother remembering much about me. And there's a loneliness for how few people manage it, a yearning there for more people to try. And there's a quiet joy there when someone does care enough to try.

It costs me, to keep noticing, to keep putting slightly vulnerable bits of myself out there to generally be brutalized or ignored, to paying careful attention to the reactions I get, to keep making myself notice what I feel. But it'd cost more to enforce my boundaries instead. (Don't ask me how I know.) There's a concept called "wu wei" - effortless action; results without strain; a careful-carefree alignment between your goals and the flows of the world. I know myself to be strange and high-context; frequently reactive and sometimes easily bruised; bearing scars and half-healed wounds but also places where I like to be stroked and scratched. So carefully filtering who gets to spend time around me is unfortunately important, and doing so subtly and with a minimum of effort is of paramount importance; setting up little systems to help with that heavy and sempiternal task.

When someone interacts with a system, they unavoidably reveal information about themself to that system, sending ripples through the water. The only question is whether you've set up that system to make use of that information. And then - to notice little responses in yourself without letting them show too strongly; to shift your weight a little such that some waves might embrace you and sweep you away, and others crash against you, as immovable as stone. The need to stand firm never ends; do you already know how to set your weight correctly?