Motivation

I found the “trade secrets” piece to be very useful, as it helped me envision what would be involved in applying the design levers to a particular policy question. And at the same time, it provided an example of one of the challenges of such a project. For example: When reading that non-compete clauses “declare a lack of trust, and an intention to seek power over the life of the employee’s future,” I wondered if this is how I would, if I were subject to such a contract, see it. I can imagine that I might not—that I might see it as a sign that my employer is a commercially sophisticated party, or even as being an essentially fair feature of my employment in a particular industry. If I saw it in either of these terms, it might not occur to me that it signaled a lack of trust. The design-levers cooperation model does predict that the certain levers will counter-act each other, and thus, in my example, the model can makes sense of the fact that seeing non-complete clause as “fair” might outweigh a tendency to see them as indicative of a lack of trust. However, the problem is that “trust,” “fair,” etc., are descriptions that are underdetermined by facts about the world. We cannot determine—as general theory and for all cases—how and why we did or will come to see the world in one way over the other. Thus, it seems that the challenge of employing the design levers in creating policy for a given system is that to do so requires knowing a lot about contingent and particular ways of seeing that are difficult to predict, and might not even emerge consistently within that system.