There's this basic principle I think about a lot, and if it has a name, I don't know what it is. However, others have definitely thought about it. Under various guises, it's known to everyone. But it's actually one underlying principle.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it "the category multiplier." (This is in reference to Immanuel Kant's version of it, which he called "the categorical imperative." Maybe my thought is exactly the same, but I think it's more detailed.)

If you act a certain way - driving a car that pollutes more than is necessary - eating meat like most everyone else - treating people who look a certain way with suspicion - expecting everyone who wants a job to manually supply a large quantity of personal information for every single application and go out of their way to get references and transcripts - it may be socially acceptable, understandable, normal, or "not that bad" in each instance. But when you take a step back and look at what happens as a result, take a long, hard, honest look at the result of that policy, you may realize that it's unfair and it's shit and it hurts.

Kant called that the categorical imperative, and he claimed it was the single most important rule for ethics. Since then, that has been much disputed, and it isn't difficult to see why. Under his formulation, which basically says "behave in a way that would be the best way if everyone behaved that way" or "follow the rule that would be the best rule if everyone followed it," you run into (in my limited understanding) two immediate problems. First, you'll never get uniformity, and is that even what we want? I don't think we want everyone acting the same. Variety and diversity are why life continues to prosper, actually. Second, any time you use rules, you categorize people/situations, and any time you categorize, you get a loss of information. That is, no two cases of blindness have ever been the same. No two children are the same. No two roads are the same. When you operate according to categories, you are necessarily losing detail, and sometimes that detail makes all the difference.

All I want to point out here is that there *is* an idea at work. There's how we act. And there's what happens if lots and lots of people act approximately that way and for approximately that reason. I'm calling that the category multiplier. It matters.

The category multiplier is what makes voting meaningful even though your vote typically makes no difference.

The category multiplier is why profiling Muslims and Arabs at the airport is unfair - and would even remain unfair to those individuals if it did manage to statistically save lives (which I'm not saying it would).

The category multiplier is involved in the Tragedy of the Commons (spoiling of public lands and resources) and the Jevons paradox (eg, advances in lightbulb efficiency or gas mileage don't seem to help, because it becomes more economical to be wasteful).

It's how you know that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" will get overly normative and then exclusionary and toxic.

It highlights that not only can individual efforts add up, multiply, and take on a group life of their own, but so can seemingly normal, convenient, and harmless simplifications and shortcuts and other oversights, which may become monstrous in aggregate.

At the same time, it helps explain how like-enough-minded individuals find each other to collaborate. Concepts have a sort of gravity and people align and gather around them.

It's sadly why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Maybe I'm putting too much under the spell of one phrase, but it seems to me that all of these are nonlinear, macro results from the use of categories by humans (on the micro level of their individual lives and daily decisions).

Benefits and costs scale in weird ways.

It's integral calculus applied to humans, in a sense.

And actually that's what the game that I've been working on for 10 years is about. It's an attempt to teach that idea in a variety of ways players can really feel and intuit.