The Ordinary Part

There is a peculiar disadvantage to helping build something you later have to live with.

You know too much about it.

I know why GRACE notices certain things. I know roughly what happens between an observation and an outcome. I know which parts took three meetings to agree on and which parts took three months. I know that some very elegant ideas became considerably less elegant once we introduced actual human beings.

And yet, most mornings, none of that is particularly relevant.

This morning I took the long way across campus.

I knew I probably should.

I had slept badly, spent too much of yesterday sitting down, and had an hour before my first meeting. There was nothing particularly profound about recognizing that another twenty minutes behind a desk was unlikely to improve me as a person.

So I took the long way.

It was sunny. Someone had a dog outside North Hall. I bought coffee from a place I normally walk straight past and ended up talking to a woman I know for ten minutes.

I arrived at work in a better mood.

That was it.

No revelation. No great triumph of computational social science. I had a nicer morning.

I think this is the part of GRACE I have come to appreciate most.

Not the moments when it does something remarkable, but the hundreds of occasions when living here makes a small thing slightly easier.

Sometimes I notice that I have been declining invitations more often than usual. Sometimes someone around me notices something before I do. Sometimes a pattern becomes difficult to keep pretending isn’t a pattern.

And sometimes GRACE annoys me.

There. I said it.

There are mornings when I am perfectly aware that I slept badly, skipped breakfast and have scheduled six hours of meetings with twelve minutes between them. I do not need the system I helped build to point out that this may be an imperfect approach to human wellbeing.

I am an adult woman. I have several degrees. I can decide to have coffee for lunch if I want to.

Occasionally, living with GRACE feels a little like being mothered by something with an extremely good memory.

The frustrating part is that I know why.

We made choices in the design of GRACE that have consequences in ordinary life. Persistent patterns matter more than convenient explanations. Information is deliberately asymmetric. Some feedback is limited because we found that giving people more information did not always produce better outcomes. Some boundaries remain in place because removing them made the system feel less restrictive while making it measurably less useful.

I was in the room for some of those decisions.

I argued for some of them.

This does not make them less annoying when they apply to me.

And I think that’s worth saying.

GRACE isn’t perfect because there is no version of it without trade-offs.

More information changes behavior. More freedom to share that information changes relationships. Fewer consequences make some parts of the system easier to live with and other parts less reliable.

We know this because we’ve tested versions of GRACE that made different choices.

Sometimes I preferred those versions.

The data didn’t.

That is a deeply irritating experience for a scientist.

It is also one of the reasons I still believe in what we built.

For someone who has spent a significant part of her professional life thinking about why people behave the way they do, I remain annoyingly human.

I forget things I know.

I rationalize.

I postpone uncomfortable conversations.

I mistake being busy for being useful.

Knowing why people do these things provides remarkably little immunity against doing them yourself.

Perhaps that is what has surprised me most.

I used to experience GRACE primarily as a question we were trying to answer. Then as a system we were trying to build. Then as something Silverdale was learning to live with.

Somewhere along the way, without really noticing when, I started living with it too.

Not theoretically.

Ordinarily.

And I like the ordinary part.

I like that my days contain slightly fewer stupid misunderstandings. I like that I sometimes recognize my own patterns before repeating them for the fourth time. I like that people around me seem a little more willing to pay attention to what their behavior actually does to other people.

None of that means I experience every part of GRACE as an improvement to every moment of my life.

I don’t.

Sometimes the system is inconvenient. Sometimes responsibility is uncomfortable. Sometimes knowing why a boundary exists does remarkably little to make me enjoy it.

But that isn’t the question we set out to answer.

We never asked whether GRACE could make every individual moment easier.

We asked whether people could live better together.

Years later, the evidence still tells me that they can.

And then there are mornings like this one.

I took the long way to work.

It was nice.

I think we sometimes forget that things are allowed to be that simple.