3 ms·

How is doing nothing better than doing something?

• slver 5y ago
  It creates the illusion of action without the effect of one. Thus it actually dissipates the social energy required for taking actions that do matter. If I can be colorful but accurate, it's basically like masturbation is to procreation. Another example of the same phenomena is the "spreading awareness" trend. Everyone is aware, everyone is also aware that everyone else is aware, but they're stuck on "spreading awareness" because that's the minimum they can do to feel like they're doing something. So in effect "spreading awareness" after some point becomes "spreading complacency". Imagine there's a fire in the house. The fire extinguisher is sitting nearby. We deeply care about not dying in the fire, but we're stuck doing absolutely nothing about it, because our only approach to escalation is to spread awareness of the fire's existence more and more angrily among each other, and never reaching for the fire extinguisher. It's the active version of something called the "bystander effect". If you know what's a deadlock in a database, false action is equivalent to livelock. Locks are not held indefinitely as they are with deadlocks, the database is actively busy taking and releasing locks non-stop. Yet, nothing is happening. Livelock is the system stuck on a loop of fruitless actions that parade as real ones, hence we don't detect our own inaction. Was that comprehensive enough?