#(public

So this was inspired by a discussion I had with a friend yesterday.

It started with me mentioning offhand that once upon a time, I had considered arguing with my university that they should publicly post their class schedules because technically, anyone is allowed to sit in on a class, but that's practically blocked off from the community by virtue of them not having access to when and where the courses are happening.

He immediately pulled up a public-facing version of the course scheduling system that I never knew existed and said something like "If people really wanted that information, they could find it."

Information accessibility is a big deal to me, so then I started to explain that "not knowing what you don't know" and the vast amount of info people have to sift through are real barriers to people obtaining information and also that "This doesn't exist," and "I can't find it," look exactly the same, so if people can't find something, they will eventually give up because of diminishing returns on the effort of looking for something that may not exist.

But he just kept saying different versions of "Well if people REALLY wanted it, they'd go find it," which really surprised me because he's liberal, very intelligent and very into philosophy, but he couldn't seem to see the logical end result of a philosophy about information access that basically comes down to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps (and if you can't, you didn't deserve to succeed)."

So he went on this rant about how the general public should simply know almost all information is out there and put in the effort to find it (without any outreach or effort to engage the public on this), and I said,

"You will be perpetually angry at how unmotivated and badly informed the public is with your current attitude. And it will never improve without people who do not have your attitude. This is the reality you are doomed to because of this perspective. It's neither good nor bad. I'm not faulting you for it, but no matter what you have to say to justify your perspective, this will always be the result."

Because any "BUT THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER IF PEOPLE WOULD JUST ____" philosophy is USELESS if you expect "people" (i.e. the public at large) to spontaneously start or stop doing something without some kind of outside effort - an outreach campaign, an educational movement, an incentive, etc.