Changing Baselines for Immigrant Families

How do we enhance what we optimize towards?

Every family in America is an immigrant family, is it not?

It’s hard to tell at first glance, as successive generations have lost culture, history, tradition, and language to a point of monoculture. Why is that?

It is an effort to optimize towards seemingly worthy goals around opportunity: wealth + knowledge. Together, these things build social capital and pedigree. However, perhaps we have gone too far from our roots in this game of assimilation.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll limit the examples to my family (immediate and extended) so as to remove any assumptions about your family. 

In my family, here’s how this worked:

This is an example of a tightly coupled system — any computer science major is currently thinking “no it’s not.” Bear with me.

A tightly coupled system is when items in a system are not linked together, but inherently depend on one another, i.e. having money does not necessarily mean you also have knowledge, but getting an education as a means to acquiring knowledge (pre-podcast era) is likely dependent on some form of wealth. 

While wealth and knowledge have historically been noble pursuits, as the Shah family evolves to the point where wealth and knowledge become baseline, what does the family system optimize towards for future generations in order to

1. Maintain: culture, history, traditions, language

2. Further: social capital and pedigree?

On one hand, the answer to this question could be quite nuanced and complex, but on the other, we know that adding complexity (precautions, an extra set of steps to follow, etc.) to systems usually yields poorer results. Take the Galileo analysis of the three-beam column support or the disaster of the 2016 Academy Award mix up for examples, details of each here. 

Here’s a quick summary:

• Three-beam column support: a dude back in the 1600s was trying to store a marble column at a construction site. He propped it up with 2 beams, one on either end of the column. Thinking that more support would be safer, he added a third support beam in the middle. The result? As later analyzed by Galileo, the central beam added pressure at the midpoint of the column, and caused it to snap in half. Definitely less than ideal.

• The 2016 Academy Awards: When Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty incorrectly announced the Best Picture award as “La La Land” instead of the real winner “Moonlight”. How? A combination of human distraction and systematic failure in the process of delivering and interpreting the contents of an envelope. 

Would these events have played out differently if a more simplistic model was chosen over an over complex one? How might we apply that towards optimizing the familial system of an immigrant, which as we’ve confirmed, is all of us?