294 - Hoops
"When one person wears many hats then most of them will fit very badly most of the time." This is also the root cause of why so many small businesses fail today, causing considerable detriment and unnecessary degrees of uncertainty to local economies.
For example, consider someone who simply wants to be a baker, opening up their own shop to share their talent with those around them. This individual effectively also needs to wear the hats of:
- A Statistician and Real Estate agent to select a good location.
- A Lawyer, to set up the entity.
- An administrator, to keep up with random and nonsensical bureaucratic filings.
- A marketer, to draw in the people who will become their customers
- A Web developer, to showcase their existence online and with a digital presence appearing on maps for navigation
- ...and so the list goes on.
What all of these other things have in common is that they are 100% unrelated to the skills of an exceptional baker. That inevitably means that the exceptional baker is unlikely to pass through all of these flaming hoops, and that those who do pass through them are unlikely to be exceptional bakers. This is "Population Dynamics" in action.
The same rings true for virtually any other common example of a small business that may be named. Some share minor overlap with the skills above, but many remain related to none of them. At present, the only thing that trivial AI technologies like LLMs can realistically contribute to without a high risk of causing significant harm is the matter of marketing, where persuasion, not truth, is the dominant factor. Even then, care is required in usage.
While many people are happy to charge a high premium for services like those above, that provides yet another nonsensical barrier of a different kind, as well as the substantial additional risks of bad actors. The burden of these things should neither be left up to the unrealistic expectation of these skills all being present nor the size of someone's wallet, as neither of those things has anything at all to do with the skills that are central to a successful small business.
The status quo severely harms all parties, even as they take that harm for granted. This is also known as "Omission Bias", the tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as more unfavorable than their equally harmful inactions (omissions). Even if a dozen flaming hoops of nonsense are the norm, they are no less destructive for it. Rather, the destruction they cause is multiplied across time, scale, and degrees of separation, particularly when they are systematically neglected.
Every year the number of flaming hoops increases, both locally and globally, with the burden placed on those least equipped for it, while consequently increasing the risks posed by bad actors. There are few better ways to kill economies than to kill off an increasing portion of local business through bureaucracy while swamping everyone in uncertainty.
