Golden - and other - rules

It is usually a good general rule of thumb, rooted in the words of Christ - sometimes even called the Golden Rule - that we should do to other as as we wish them to do to ourselves - although George Bernard Shaw meant that "you should not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you, as their tastes may not be the same".
And you do not have to read many formative stories for kids to see that it may be excessive simplification - as soon as you have seen the rabbit treat the cat with carrots and in turn be invited to eat fish, you find that the Golden Rule can not stand alone by itself.

Image courtesy of pixabay / DasWortgewand

But then I recently encountered a quote by British literary theorist Terry Eagleton:

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.

- which could be considered to be an appropriate trade-off between Shaw and the Golden Rule.
Eagleton may be said to have a point here - the only problem is that it's so easy to use the Golden Rule. If you have to pay equal attention to the needs of other people, it requires that you actually understand the needs of others. But if we consider it carefully, then we quickly come to realize that it's worth the effort.
(Translated from Gyldne - og andre - regler)

On the topic of compressed complexity

I was part of a fascinating discussion taking part on Twitter the other day - regarding whether it was possible to agree with the following quote or not.

Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well a message is received as how well it was sent.

Most of the involved did not agree with it - but it is difficult to express the reasoning behind one's opinion in 140 characters, so it inspired me to write the following:
I think the problem is that the meaning of "well received" is ambiguous - as there's a possibility to understand "the message is well received" as both "the audience likes the message" or "the audience understands the message". And if substituting these two interpretations into the quote, we get two very different messages.
One of them: "Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well the audience likes the message, as how well it was sent" there is some truth to - there are some messages that it is basically impossible to deliver in a way that causes the audience to like it - most notably messages that affect the receivers' personal lives in a bad manner.
The other one: "Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well the audience understands the message, as how well it was sent" on the other hand, is very difficult to defend. Because it is difficult to deny that if the audience does not understand the message, then the message per definition has not been well sent. The sender simply cannot claim to have delivered a message well sent if no one gets it, and the only one able to do anything about it is the sender, who can try to understand the receivers better and adjust the message accordingly.
In short: It's more important that the message is clear than the message is appealing to the audience.
But I think the underlying problem is is another point on communication: it's difficult to deliver a complex message in a tweet (or a simple image). So basically, it is fair to say that the message created by whoever put the quote out on Twitter in the first place was not very well received - and not very well sent either. So in a strange negative way, the quote at least partially underlined its point.
(Translated from Noget om komprimeret kompleksitet)