Quality (Unreleased)

Does quality matter? I really want to know.

"I can feel if something is quality, immediately - I feel it by touch"

Higher quality means more useful

Whole foods, saturated fats, beans and nuts.

Quality is a difficult word because it implicitly reads as “higher quality” even when the word “higher” is omitted. A quality car, is synonymous to saying a higher quality car. To be clear - quality is a word that denotes the difference between A and B. It denotes the specific characteristic that one thing has, and the other thing does not have.

Value on the other hand is about usefulness. Food is inherently useful to humans as it sustains our lives. High quality food is more useful than than low quality food. That is how quality and value live together.

Quality is about comparison

Quality it is a term that exists because of production and consumerism. It exists because of a need to distinguish in an environment of abundance.

Abundance

Reasoning about quality is at the heart of being a consumer. It is a word that is used to distinguish, what segment of production provides more value, and what less. A way to reason about your role as the consumer and a framework to think about products as solutions to your particular needs.

When people talk about quality they start with first hand experience, observations and anecdotal evidence. Their first impressions, prejudice and quick judgement construct the set pieces. They use various thinking processes, some logical and others that might be more subtle as actors. Their values, expectations, current level of economic well-being, culture and acquired benefits set the stage. And these all play a part to form something that resolves into qualitative thinking.

And being so complex and subjective, it is no wonder that it gets muddled up:

https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-streeters-fooled-expensive-wine-mix-up-at-nyc-restaurant-2020-10?r=US&IR=T

Quality is about figuring out what makes a difference. Literally.

Now the problem is, that we humans have some trouble distinguishing what makes a difference, and we do get it mixed up. We are too focused on the surface level games to understand what things are actually useful and forward pushing.

We should, for example, care if human life is wasted as that is our only real money. We should care, if the land is exploited as that is the only inheritance we got and the only one we’ll pass on. We should care about humanity’s sustainability as it is only ours to lose. We should care about our fellow humans and the way they think, as they simply cannot be cancelled out. These are all our problems, and nobody else will come and take care of them for us.

Given that any production can have anywhere from 1 to 10000 qualities that distinguishes it from the other production, you need to be selective and aware of the 3-5 things that make the biggest difference.

Most people will fall into a trap of assigning value only to immediate performance metrics between two productions. Something being higher performance than something else is only higher quality in one relevant axis. If it requires child labor to achieve those metrics - it is still blind consumerism or greed.

And we as humans, we choose to avert our eyes from a big chunk of relevant qualities. Us consumers might forget to consider that for example, technology has other quality metrics than performance such as exploitation of natural resources and people. We can forget to care that game development has other quality metrics than FPS, visuals, price and game length such as exploitation of people. We can fall trap to thinking narrowly of these things, when we should remind ourselves to take a wider look. This is why thinking about quality is important and everyone should do it.

HOW IS QUALITY MADE?

If you are on the production side, then if you wish any success today, you must make sure that the things that you produce are somehow more useful or less exploitative than whatever is already out there - preferably even when casting a very wide perspective net.

Thinking about what makes a difference is critical. It is also the definition of quality.

I would argue that the amount of wide bandwidth qualitative thinking you do, directly correlates with how much you are able to stand out. Being able to see what the world lacks is critical. Being able to see what makes the world worse is a must. Therefore ultimately, thinking is the currency that buys higher quality. To be able to be different in a useful way also requires copious amounts of creativity. It unfortunately also requires saying no to a great deal of immediately attractive short term gains.

I would further argue, that higher quality from a production outcome perspective, is directly linked with the ability to think about optimal solutions within a very large frame of reference. A sub optimal organisation making an optimal product can still produce negative differences when compared to other companies. An optimal organisation producing a product that already exists and brings nothing different to the table is just wasting resources. You have to make something that is different in a useful way. It could simply be, treating your employees better than anyone else.

High quality is achieved through the active reduction of harm. Stellar quality is achieved through life transforming usefulness and flawless ethical backbone.

And this, I believe, is hugely important.

How can something BE SIMULTANEOUSLY BAD QUALITY AND high quality?

Most things are simultaneously bad and high quality, especially if you’re assessing them properly.

Tesla cars are a perfect example of the interesting nature of high quality. They stand out by being incredibly fast cars with a supposed end to end sustainability story line which is firmly rooted in the idea that we humans need sustainable things to be able to sustain ourselves in the long term.

When Tesla entered the market, they were providing something that is both different, incredibly useful and actually transformative. Tesla cars had also, anywhere from 100 to 1000 qualities where it could be compared to other petrol car manufacturer mammoths and on most if not all of these axis, Tesla makes terrible build quality. So how is it that a terrible build quality car with a sustainability story can be so successful?

It is simply the best quality car in its own category. It has room to be bad in a lot of ways because it is transformative enough in other ways, and we humans allow jankiness in all things that are new as long as they have something big enough underneath that shows promise.

People chose their 3 to 5 things that matter in Tesla, the company and the car, and when the future of the planet is against the fact that water leaks into the boot of the car, people tend to be lenient on other factors.

I would not shame anyone for thinking that Tesla is definitely a low quality product, in fact I would argue that it is. There is simply too much things overlooked for the few qualities that it does possess. It also has a history of poor management practices, poor employee quality of life and actually poor production quality. I believe, people who are buying Teslas are in fact thinking about quality extremely selectively. And we all do that, given the right situation.

Tesla breeds competition in its wake at an incredible rate, which also means that its breaches in quality will be challenged. This will either drive their culture towards higher holistic quality or it will end up as another General Motors.

A sidenote on GDP AND GPI

GDP (Gross domestic product) unfortunately is an example of a indicator that we’ve allowed to become a definition of value and it lives like a cancer at the root of the problems we face today.

It is a metric from the post war era, that has its idealistic root in avoiding famine through emphasizing aggressive competition and narrowing the definition of the production equation to simply an output. It is the heart that beats in the chest of capitalism and is largely the reason to it having become the abomination that it is.

GDP is used by countries to reason about their standings in relation to each other. It is the thing that makes a country supposedly more useful. GDP is hugely problematic due to its lopsided focus on measuring simply the output side of the production equation. Guns, gasoline and vaccines are all equally valuable as far as this metric is concerned.

GDP then, creates a feedback loop on the production system and the society to optimize for the outcome no matter the input. It also encourages competition and therefore has no mechanism to penalize overproduction or negative social outcomes.

In current times, this simply no longer works as more and more large companies are standing out by treating their employees and resources in an ethical way across the production.

It is also more and more difficult to abstract away the exploitation of earth or cultures around the world. Internet provides unprecedented access to the details and origins of materials. Companies stuck on the GPI mindset will do every trick in the book to completely abstract away the atrocities they perform to provide you their ethical eggs, diesel cars and Cyberpunk games. Companies that do this, will die away.

People vote with their money on this already and so should you. Just make sure you think and learn to think before voting.

Genuine Progress Indicator

On a societal level, the Genuine progress indicator has been suggested as a replacement for GDP. It is in this exactly, that the change I alluded to before can be seen. Production of any goods, is not seen anymore as simply a zero sum game of maximize profit at the cost of everything - rather, it is evolving to become a more balanced take on the relationship of value, well-being, ethics, environment, production and consumption.

Now, it is interesting to note, that by the time of writing this - at the end of 2021, GPI is still not the system we use. It is simply on the level of a proposal.

Nothing should be stopping you from voting with your money though.

Why you should question your thinking about quality

The reason I write this is that I have a hard time with my role as a consumer and a producer of things. I’ve obsessed over understanding my relationship with stuff, money, value and quality. If someone asks me, why something should be improved, why it is worth it - I’d like to say that I’ve thought about it. So, this is for me:

Quality has no meaning, unless you expand your vision to a more fuller accounting of what is going on. The marketing and the money machinery aims to make sure, that the difference you are able to distinguish becomes as marginal and localized as possible.

However, it is your duty to make sure that this does not happen. Being a consumer is unavoidable and it is simply your duty to be informed of what your time and money go on to do. If you work in production, like most of us do, then you must understand the systems that you partake in and how you can stand out. Quality is therefore a deeply important concept to be thinking about.