I got asked a while ago "what I would do" about "Saddam Hussein".

When I get asked how I would arrange the world, I like to take a day or two to chew it over. Because usually, it's not just a matter of answering, it's a matter of first correcting the question.

Questions people ask carry their assumptions, and those assumptions tend to limit their thinking.

For example, if you're arguing with someone who is trying to learn to fly by gluing feathers to his arms and flapping them real hard, at some point, you're gonna get asked "Well, okay, smart guy, what would you do if you jumped out a plane and didn't have a parachute?"

If you answer the question as it's asked, you can say "spread my arms and legs and hope". And he'll say "Ah-hah! You admit that mine is the best idea!"

Or you can say "there's nothing to do in that situation". And he'll say "Ah-hah! You criticize my idea, but you have no ideas at all!"

But what you do is you don't answer any question that carries hidden assumptions. Instead, you point out the assumptions and correct the question.

In this case, you say, "I wouldn't jump out of a plane without a parachute."

And he'll say, "But what if you did?"

Just keep saying "I wouldn't."

So, how would I "deal with" Saddam Hussein?

Simple. I wouldn't. I wouldn't put myself in that position in the first place. If you don't have a parachute, don't jump, genius. Why the fuck would I put myself in a position to care what happens in Kuwait?

"But they're an ally!"

What the fuck does even mean, when you're talking about a country the size of a postage stamp with no army to speak of? How the fuck is that an ally? There's no mutuality in that mutual defense. Who the fuck decided to "ally" with them?

This is just using a previous bad decision to justify the bad decision of doubling down on the bad decision.

"But we need to be allied with Kuwait because we are dependent on foreign oil!"

Well, there's another shit decision. So now we're justifying our bad decisions in terms of our previous bad decision which was in turn justified by another bad decision we made even earlier?

Stop running around the world looking for oil like a stoner in a weed drought. Build fast breeder reactors.

"But the idea of corium scares me!"

Okay, so your shit decision that prompted your shit decision that prompted your shit decision was based on yet another shit decision... the decision to base policy on your feels rather than data.

You wanna buy into FUD instead of asking yourself how many Three Mile Islands it takes to equal one Deepwater Horizon. (Hint: 71 if you're counting dollars. Infinite if you're counting lives.)

That's the problem with talking public policy with most people. Their shit decisions are based on an infinite recursion of shit decisions, stretching back to a point in history that they identify as "that's just the way the world is".

In the spirit of this realization, I would like to introduce Whisper's Three Step Plan for Not Being a Retard.

1. Don't make stupid choices.
2. If you have already made a stupid choice, don't double down on it.
3. If you inherit a stupid choice someone else made before you were here, cut your losses and change direction.

Yes, the first one is difficult, and the second two are painful. But you can either suffer the pain of admitting error, or suffer the pain of not admitting error.

One of the most important things I learned in twenty five years of engineering is that the earlier a problem is detected, the cheaper and easier it is to fix. The same bug that cost you five dollars when it's caught by a unit test suite or code analysis tool will cost you five hundred dollars when it's caught by the QA team, or five million dollars if it's caught by users.

But it's not enough to just detect a problem. Before you can solve it, cheaply or not, you also have to admit that it is a problem. If you try to save your face, or your ego, or your budget, by pretending it was a good decision all along, then you're just going to have to fix it later, when it's worse. Or you're going to wait until it's so bad that you cannot fix it, and it kills everything you tried to build.

But that's not the worst part about not facing your previous bad decisions. The worst part about it is that the longer you avoid that self-awareness, the greater the cost of that moment, and the more you're going to want to put it off and hide your head in the sand. Which in turn makes things even worse in a self-perpetuating cycle.

There are a lot of dudes out there, mostly ex-SOCOM types, who spent their entire careers on US foreign policy. Who lost friends. Who came home with permanent injuries, both physical and psychological. Who based their entire ego-identity around the idea that they were defending freedom and their homeland.

How much do you think it would cost them to face the lie? To realize that all their suffering and sacrifice was for the sake of the Rockefellers and Lockheed Martin? That's some stick-a-P320-in-your-mouth level existential crisis shit right there. And it's not surprising that even guys who will happily freeze their asses off swimming miles off Coronado would rather not face that shit.

That's why they'll spin you true, but ultimately irrelevant, tales about how bloodthirsty the people who hate us are, justifying this decade's shit decision in terms of the previous decade's shit decision. And that's how you end up in a VA hospital missing both legs while Boeing stockholders are in Barbados drinking pina coladas.

See, the secret is that you don't become a retard by making bad decisions. Everyone makes bad decisions. I once dated a Ukrainian-American lingerie model whose love language was "gifts".

While I was broke and in college.

No, retards are people who double down on their back decisions instead of backing out of them the moment they realize they were bad. Learn to do this, and you will survive your mistakes. I survived Kateryna.

If you have trouble with this notion, remember that you don't have to admit your screwups to anyone but yourself... if you just stop doing that, and let the matter drop, people will usually forget. Also remember that some things take time and persistence to pay off, but that's not an excuse for continuing to lie to yourself once you realize that your bad results are coming from your choices, not from lack of commitment to them.

Lastly, do not flagellate yourself, literally for metaphorically, for these kinds of mistakes. The more ashamed you are of making mistakes, the harder it will be to admit to yourself that you made them.

The secret to not fucking up your life, whether you are a single person or an entire country, is as simple as "When you are already in a hole, stop digging."

Tip Whisper for their post.