Contribution

Groping Towards a Definition

Image from Midjourney

I have a very strong intuitive sense of the shape of something, which I’m starting to realize might be good to flesh out.

I might call it a “contribution”, or a “constructive” or “productive” activity.

Value

Most prototypically, this would be making a physical object, like a bowl, or a painting, or a machine.

Or doing something materially useful for people, like growing crops or treating the sick or writing software.

Often, materially useful contributions result in getting paid, but not always; it’s no less a productive contribution if you’re taking care of your own children or writing an open-source library.

Something that is not materially valuable can still be valuable, to be clear — a movie (at least, any movie of professional quality) is definitely a contribution to the world. It’s an example of “real work” someone did.

Thingness (or Non-Triviality)

“Contribution” isn’t just “being valuable to someone”, though.

It’s more centrally a “contribution”, in my mind, the more unambiguously you’ve Done a Thing.

If you’re a therapist, you can indeed improve someone’s life…but therapy exists on a continuum between “talking”, which everyone does every day, and “extraordinarily helpful talking”. It’s not clear just from finding out that someone “is a therapist” whether they have a nontrivial skill or technique at all. And that uncertainty, I think, makes even an example of incredibly good therapy not feel unambiguously like “A Thing” in the same way that, say, giving someone an MRI is “A Thing.”

Even a needless or botched MRI — an MRI that is not helpful to the patient — is still someone performing an activity that is supposed to be a form of skilled and useful work. Performing MRIs is not something you’d just find yourself doing inadvertently in the course of everyday life; it’s very specifically demarcated as something that is supposed to require specialized training and is supposed to make a (measurable, inarguable) contribution to health. A particular MRI scan that happens to be harmful is Definitely A Thing, just not in this case a good thing.

Some paintings are better than others, but everyone who puts paint to canvas has definitely made a painting. Even a bad painting is something that is discretely different from daily life activities. It’s clearly A Thing.

Writing and talking are ordinary daily life activities, so by default they’re not really Things.

But a formalized, completed, carefully organized work like a novel or a structured poem has some Thingness. Writing literature is clearly not the same sort of activity as the everyday effluvia of talk we all create in passing.¹

There’s also Thingness in a piece of writing that adds genuinely novel information to the world (as with investigative reporting or scientific experiment) or a piece that organizes or collects information in one place that you couldn’t easily find elsewhere.

There’s even Thingness in a piece that proposes a distinct, novel plan/proposal/roadmap or a new hypothesis, but only when it’s very definite, concrete, and unambiguously distinct from other things people say all the time. Having thoughts and ideas is an ordinary daily life activity — to turn an idea into a substantial piece of work, there needs to be enough stuff in it, enough originality or structure or “having done the homework”, to make it unambiguously more than a passing thought.

For example, I think this essay is very low on Thingness. If all I wrote were essays like this one, I wouldn’t consider this blog a Thing.

As another example, for the purposes of my early-stage project spreadsheet, for instance, I didn’t count blogs or consulting practices as “projects”, but I did count datasets, directories, archives, or other information resources.

An “information resource” is clearly an artifact that took systematic effort to assemble and is intended to be useful to other people, including strangers — it cannot be confused with a diary-like form of self-expression or a socializing-like form of personal communication.

Benevolence (or Positive-Sum-Ness)

All constructive activity has at least some benevolent, non-hostile, positive-sum component.

You can write or speak as an act of pure hostility against someone. Activism or advocacy can be pretty much pure zero-sum opposition. So can litigation.²

It is a lot harder to make a ceramic bowl “at” someone.

Dude. It’s a bowl. It can’t be hostile.

All it can do is be useful (and/or beautiful) to whoever holds it, or at worst a waste of resources.

Most artifacts aren’t weapons. Producing them is purely helping someone, not hurting anybody, in any way beyond the (usually unintended) harms of wasted resources and problematic side effects.

It is possible for a generally “constructive” activity to produce an artifact with some adversarial function, like a satirical painting that’s meant to be an “attack” on its target, or an avant-garde painting that is intentionally unpleasant to some viewers. But the more skill is involved in producing the artifact, the more non-adversarial cognition the creator has to put into it along with the adversarial intent.

You have to be good with paint to make the painting look the way you want. You have to be good with machines to build modern weapons. There’s a lot of non-hostile, problem-solving or creative or collaborative, intent.

So there can be a “constructive” or “productive” component, even if the artifact does have adversarial function.

For that matter, a really good boxer has to do a lot of non-adversarial skill building in order to be successful at combat…but that’s an edge case, where you can’t really separate out a “non-fighting component” of a boxing match.

You can separate out a lot of non-adversarial components of skill/technique in a fighter plane or a legal defense. There are non-adversarial uses for, say, knowing the law or structuring a logical argument; there are non-adversarial uses for airplanes and for the skills of machining, assembly, electrical and mechanical engineering, etc.

The closer an activity is to a purely personal conflict, the less you can separate out any non-adversarial skills or components. It becomes just the conflict.

And the more “pure conflict” it is, the less of a “contribution” or “productive activity” it is.

A harangue is not a contribution.

(“But what if it has a grain of truth? What if you need to hear it?” Well, even so, if it isn’t original or informative, if it’s just telling you things you feared or suspected but have heard a bajillion times before, if anybody including a chatbot could compose it, then no, it’s not a contribution.)

Upshot: Yay “Scientism”?

It sometimes gets pejoratively called “scientism” to prefer framings or approaches that are “sciencey” or “technical”, or prefer to focus on STEM-y issues rather than social or cultural issues, over and above the practical benefits that STEM methods have in certain circumstances. Like “you don’t need to invoke the brain or neuroscience to explain this aspect of human experience, it doesn’t add anything.”

I would say that “scientism” is underrated, actually.

And, for similar reasons, so are “legalism”, “medicalism”, and whatever the equivalents would be for arts, crafts, manufacturing, and agriculture.

“Technical” disciplinary language, or framing an issue as a “technical” problem to “solve”, isn’t always the only way to do it, and indeed sometimes the “technical” jargon doesn’t add any intellectual clarity.

It can still serve another purpose, of priming people to think in constructive, reality-oriented, positive-sum ways, as one typically would in a “technical” context.

In a “technical” context you expect that there’s little ambiguity about the value of your goal (who wouldn’t want to fix the broken machine? who wouldn’t want to make the patient healthier, or make the souffle rise properly?) but significant challenge in execution and an obvious need for objectivity.

You’re trying to get something to “work”, it is obvious that you would want this, and pretty intuitive what “working” means, but it is not at all obvious how. It is perfectly natural to care about what really works and how various attempts will turn out, and to want to correct yourself and be corrected if you are mistaken about the facts of the matter.

And, when you are discussing the issue with other people, it is also intuitively natural that they should also want the thing to “work” and mean pretty much the same thing by “working” as you do.³ It is also natural to be detail oriented in a “technical context”, in a way that might sound “pedantic” or “nitpicky” in other contexts, because you expect details to matter and expect your collaborators to have a good chance of hashing them out.

Framing any issue in the language and cognitive toolkit of any constructive activity can be helpful insofar as it primes people to take a more constructive attitude, or attracts people who are inclined to take a constructive attitude.

If you leave it as a “social”, “cultural”, “political”, “philosophical”, “spiritual”, or “personal” thing, that tells people to expect that we can’t really get anywhere, that we can’t anticipate any uncontroversial/unambiguous sort of “progress” or “productive result”. People can individually express themselves; they can group into factions, they can compete or come into conflict; but don’t expect any clear-cut, inarguable, “yep we did Something Real today” steps forward.

It’s not that there aren’t examples of Definitely A Thing in the humanities or social sciences, of course, but they seem to be localized to specific disciplines or particular thinkers; if without further specification you frame something as social, cultural, political, or philosophical, it doesn’t make me start out hopeful.

And likewise, there’s a lot of terrible science where they do just make things up. Maybe even the majority of “science” by volume. But even a half-decent high school science or math class or Discovery Channel show can give a taste of a domain where One Doesn’t Just Make Things Up, There’s A World Out There, And It’s Cool And Inspires Wonder.

For instance, I hate neurobabble as much as the next person, and often it doesn’t add anything intellectually and even gets in the way of what you’re actually talking about. But it does set a context where “the brain” is something you can look at, take apart, analyze the pieces of, etc. Where you can actually get somewhere. And also it evokes a sort of sparkly, colorful, fireworks-like, set of associations, with words like “exploration” and “wonder” and “discovery”. It suggests a benign, exciting unfolding vista. Setting that context can be healthy even if you never use any specific details about the brain in the rest of your discussion (though of course it detracts from the logical or explanatory value if you use concepts inappropriately).

1. In a culture where extemporaneous poetry was a normal social activity, would a poem seem less like a “Thing” and more like a part of daily life?

2. “Zero sum” is not the same thing as “bad” — sometimes it makes sense to oppose someone.

3. Of course you can get into disagreements about how to measure success, but in broad strokes people pretty much agree on what a “good” patient outcome is…much more than they agree on what a “good person” or “good society” is.