The trouble with questions of morality and judgment is that if there is one morally best option, that takes brain power to find and verify as best. It may not be the same kind of brain power that finds and verifies a mathematical proof, or a new network protocol, or a force of nature. But it is still brain power. And not everyone will be equally adept at it, or even have the same level of biological potential for it. In other words, if there really is one right answer morally, then finding it becomes in some sense academic. It becomes a matter of getting the right answer on the test of life.

We have this simplifying ideal that everyone knows right from wrong, and some people simply choose to do wrong.

If that's your basic belief, I think you live in a fantasy world.

One theory of what life is is a climb to the vista of greatest potentiality. You're more alive, healthier, when you have more possible choices, when there are more paths you could take.

In a sense health is just functionality. A healthy body can do many things; a sick body can do fewer things; a dead body can't do much. The same for the mind. Health is functionality is freedom, or potential freedom. And the kind of life we know and love evolves toward freedom. We're similar to chimpanzees and bonobos but individually we have more potentials than they do currently. That's what makes us more "advanced," according to this perspective.

If you understand life this way, it ties in with entropy, and helps give a scientific basis to morality. Morality is actually about freedom. What do you do with freedom to increase it, rather than reduce it?

Sometimes we dedicate ourselves to something and block out a lot else. That's sacrificing some kinds of freedom for more of another. It's like trading currencies.

Maybe we aren't free at all. Maybe the universe is fully deterministic. But I don't believe that.

Why would I? Do you? There's nothing to gain from believing it - nor would we have the choice either way if it's true - and everything to lose from believing it if it's false. If you believe in total determinism in a deterministic universe, that's the universe dictating what you believe (and no thanks to you that you're a good mirror, in a sense). If you believe in total determinism in a partly non-deterministic universe, that's squandering your probably greatest, probably most definitive asset.

You need to be able to argue in favor of multiple positions, theories, hypotheses, and points of view, including the ones you believe aren't accurate. Even the ones you happen to think are dangerous—it really behooves us to understand what arguments are in favor of the danger. Someone out there is working from that blueprint, and it's safer if you understand it and can calmly enlighten anyone about the mistakes in it.*

We've got this expression, "playing devil's advocate." It's a really important skill, but sometimes I think the name is unfortunate and misleading. Putting "devil" on there puts the cart before the horse; sometimes the devil's advocate position is absolutely right, and either way, I don't think the devil has much to do with this. "Playing devil's advocate" can be compared to "the devil is in the details," and in both cases it's about the thing you overlooked turning into a problem. If you DON'T play devil's advocate, that's the devil in the details that you missed. By NOT playing devil's advocate, you invite the "devil," or in other words, unexpected dangers and difficulties.

Very often when you play devil's advocate, you'll either annoy people or get them downright suspicious of you. People who don't want to make waves or seem suspicious will avoid this out of decency, and might even end up believing that to think in such a "devilish" (troubleshooting) way is wrong and dangerous. They'll block certain lines of thought from their minds and treat any mention of these lines of thought by others with stigma.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see what just happened there. A misguided moral instinct ruined a group's ability to talk issues through thoroughly and accurately.

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*(It's also safer if your copy of the blueprint is completely accurate, rather than biased by upset, your personal moral code, and judgment. Many people, people of all stripes, can spot personal propaganda and straw man arguments and when they do, it undermines you.)

Am I saying anything surprising? When I check out at the supermarket and I'm paging around looking for ginger, I shouldn't eventually find it under "Root Ginger."

- SNIP - this is really boring I now recognize and admit, you can quit here -

No ever says that. It does make immediate sense from one direction, yet that's the wrong direction for a user interface: I have no doubt what it means on sight. But this is a list customers flip around through all day, every day, in every Safeway, with a name already in mind. They're looking for it by name, which they know, because they picked it and want to buy it. There is no other item in the list that has "ginger" in the name. There isn't even a "Gi-" entry.

Presumably this is the name in some more general purpose database, or else it's to help cashiers (who may be foreign and who didn't pick this item) to look up roots that look mysterious or similar to each other, and then go by the picture.

It's trivial to put an item in a database under multiple names. But I can see why they didn't - the entire catalogue is there to leaf through on the screen, so they only want to show each item in one alphabetic spot, to avoid scads of clutter. And if the "Root -" idea is to help cashiers, then that'll be the preferred name to display in the on-screen produce gallery anyway. Also, if customers can so easily type in the name to do a lookup, then this isn't a big hardship.

Except customers are less likely to know (or remember offhand) that there's a typed name lookup button. Cashiers will know and remember this and be speedy about it after the first day. So by extension, if a cashier doesn't recognize a root but they know roots are listed under "Root -", they'll know where to look: they use that typed name lookup button and type "root" (or the first couple letters), and voila, they didn't even have to page through the whole gallery of images.

Ultimately Safeway may have chosen to put their cashiers first and make the root situation more intuitive for ones who are struggling with language. Or perhaps anything else. So the listing is "Root Ginger" everywhere.

It's a compromise. Also, they're probably reluctant to change it now that many people are familiar with it.

It isn't a very good solution, though. Every time a customer gets ginger and checks out themselves, this will come up. Every single time, until they know it--and it'll only go away as long as they remember it.

It'll hit new customers and those returning after an absence the most. Like me. But I'm savvy about this stuff. So my impatience/frustration/annoyance is minimal compared to what it might be. (And I can analyze it this way, though it took conscious effort. Many people would assume "Root Ginger" has something to do with categories in the system, but I'm fairly sure that has little or nothing to do with it. It's for the cashiers.)

Putting cashiers first is good, but think about customers who don't speak English well, either. They know they picked something which they know is ginger; they likely checked the price, saw the label, and know what they're holding is "Ginger." They're less likely to look for "Root." Or... some would be very unlikely to do so. Others might think of that option faster than a native speaker fixated on the idea that "ginger" absolutely must be in here somewhere.

Things should be under their actual names in the photo gallery. Searching should include a larger database of alternate names. The downside there is that as you type, you might see several variations of the same thing (ginger, ginger root, root ginger) and not know whether they're the same. So adding synonyms to the database introduces a different moment of confusion elsewhere.

Good voice recognition would probably get rid of this issue. Accurate photo recognition also. (But both would need a fallback, for example the current approach.) And I think better software design would also get rid of the problem. The aforementioned little problem/downside to alternate names in the database is solvable.

What this comes down to is a compromise, a workaround that doesn't require overhauling the user interface or database.

The same problem tends to come up with orange sweet potatoes (yams - both yam and sweet potato are names confused with and applied to other species), and also turnips, which are often under "Purple Turnips" where I live and shop. None of this makes sense when you already know the name. Even if you know they're purple turnips, no supermarket around here has multiple turnip varieties. If we aren't listing the cultivar of carrots or ginger or garlic, we shouldn't be listing the cultivar of turnips as a prerequisite to checking out, paying, and going home.

It might seem like a tiny, inconsequential thing I'm talking about. And while I think the impact could be larger than we intuit, that isn't my point. There's a more general concept at work here. But I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about names and alternative names, and access through those symbols.