Trying to make a joke that doesn’t offend anyone in 2018 pic.twitter.com/iXt7vcgtYc

— Comedy Unleashed (@UnleashedComedy) December 14, 2018

Offense culture is something I am still thinking about. It doesn’t have any obvious antecedents because in some ways we’ve developed new minds as a result of technological changes and informational abundance.

The nearest prior similar behavior I can find is dueling culture, tribal retribution cycles, and Edwardian-era review feuds — but none of these are really all that close to what we see now in how it effectively stifles expression and causes fear of saying the wrong thing.

What bothers me about most analysis is that it never takes into consideration the other possibilities and how outcomes or starting points could’ve been different, how it never even mentions the cloud of possible state spaces of alternate realities that surround all decisions.

It seems a huge failure to me, especially in those who purport to understand what occurred and why. If you don’t understand what else could’ve occurred, or what else almost occurred, or what opportunity cost resulted due to what actually occurred, of what value is your analysis?

Don’t tell me it’s hard. I know it’s hard. I do it all the time myself since no one else seems to be that interested in it, so I am intimately familiar with exactly what cognitive effort it takes and how much research. But the alternative is being much stupider. Given the alternative, I prefer the difficult path.