"Guy on Red Tractor" – A new heuristic for evaluating social experimentation
One of my new favorite quotes, received from my friend Mike B. last night:
Any more, I run all social experiments through a machine I call “Guy on Red Tractor.” Whenever I hear some theory, I imagine I walk out to a guy on a red tractor working a field, and get his view point. “Hey, mister on the tractor, do you think two men should get married?” “Sir, you on the tractor, do you think men and women should share prison space together?”
I then know how to think about any social experiment.
UPDATE: Mike points out that the latter was a real position of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
