Respectable people don't Litter
05/05/2026
I was at the junction of Mont-Royal/St-Denis the other day waiting for the lights to change and there was a business man in a suit standing next to me. Just as the lights changed to let us cross he reached into his bag for something and a plastic container of mints fell out and hit the floor. About thirty little white mints popped out and rolled all over the road like marbles.
It reminded me of a recurring memory of mine. I must have been about twelve and me and my friend were out in Croydon with his mum. She'd bought us each a chocolate bar or something like that and once I'd finished mine I discretely tried to just drop the wrapper on the ground. I don't know why I did it. I'd never really littered before. Perhaps it was because I'd seen other people do it, and I was with someone new (and in Croydon?), so I wanted to try it out - to see what it would be like.
Well my friend's mum saw, scowled, and asked me to pick up the wrapper immediately. And maybe because my friend was there I huffed and puffed about actually doing it. And then, almost from nowhere, I told her that it was actually good to litter because otherwise all the people paid to pick up litter would be out of jobs.
That got a huge laugh out of my friend - who took my side and goaded his mum about it. This was amazing. I'd totally 180'd the situation - rather than thinking I'd done something stupid, my friend was now thinking I'd done something clever - and it was his mum who was the new target of ridicule.
That was the first time I realised that it can be a lot of fun (and impress people) to argue for things that are not true.
My friend's mum had a look on her face like, if I were not somebody else's child, there would be hell to pay. But she didn't take my bait - she just repeated that I should pick it up.
And you know what, something about that kind of annoyed me. So she wasn't even going to argue back and tell me why my argument was stupid? If it was such a stupid argument then shouldn't it have been trivial for her to destroy it? She was going to get her way just because she had the authority, not because she had better arguments than me - and I'd be forced to pick up that bloody wrapper either way.
And then I wondered if I was actually right all along about the jobs thing. Should I be doubling-down here? Perhaps in my moment of wit I'd actually stumbled on a genius argument and my friend's mum was just not intelligent enough to see it. After all, she was not the one coming up with nice little remarks, and all the teachers in my class were always telling me I was very smart.
But in the end, I thought, continuing to protest would probably just annoy my friend. So I quickly picked up the wrapper and we went on our way.
As for our guy at the crossing of Mont-Royal/St-Denis, he also had to make a split-second decision - and he decided to just walk on and leave his mints scattered all over the pavement and road.
Look - I don't want to come down too hard on this guy - we've all been in that kind of situation before and I'm sure many of us have walked away too. He looked in a hurry, but also - collecting thirty mints rolling around a busy junction is probably not super smart either? And maybe they'll just dissolve in the rain, or be crushed by car tires, or be washed away into the gutters? I passed the same spot this morning and yes - I can verify that the mints are gone - so I think it's fair to say the dropped mints were actually not a big deal in the story of Montreal.
But while it's an undeniable truth that the mints are now gone, this does not mean they disappeared on their own. By walking away from the mints, our business guy simply passed on the torch - someone will have had to work out what to do with the mints, and most likely it was the kind of person who, according to twelve-year-old-me at least, would have been without a job if not for him.
That's one of the mad things about living on a planet with 8 billion people. If you have an inconvenience, in certain circumstances you can pretty much just baseball bat that thing into the crowd and let it hit some random poor sod on the head. To you, the inconvenience may as well have disappeared. To the person who got it to the head - it may as well have teleported out of nowhere. Isn't that fun!
Something about this business guy also reminded me of someone I was speaking to at a conference once. He was the kind of guy who thinks a fun conversation at a conference is a "let's have an argument - doesn't matter about what" conversation. And lucky for him there are close to an endless number of annoying topics to argue with people about at Machine Learning conferences. In this argument I was playing the Luddite, and he was playing the Futurist, and eventually, in an attempt to find common ground, I found myself retreating until I was basically defending the statement "we should try to make good games, and try not to make bad games" - to which his response was "I don't think so".
Now, don't be fooled into thinking his objection was on the grounds of some kind of nuance (e.g. that different people have different criteria about what makes a game good or bad). He simply didn't think people in the industry should feel any kind of responsibility to try and make games good, beyond, you know, an attempt to make enough money to buy food and pay rent or something.
I came close to retreating further, and letting slip "We should improve society somewhat", but I figured at that point we're pretty much done.
But honestly, should I be surprised? Anyone who has worked in tech will know that you don't need to go far to meet people who are in some sense pretty much constantly spilling all of their mints on the floor and then walking away.
And many such people have probably thought to themselves at some point "Man I really should drop my personal motto 'don't be evil'. It has become this kind of 'albatross' around my neck. Because I've drop my mints all over the floor (again), and I really don't want to pick them up this time."
Similarly, half of Silicon Valley has adopted an investment strategy based on a kind of negging, where you tell investors that the obviously bad thing you are doing is actually good thing - but only for people smart enough to see it. For example, did you know it is actually GOOD to travel swiftly and make objects non-functional, and BAD to tread carefully and improve stuff, for reasons that are probably a little too complex for your simple and behind-the-times brain to comprehend.
Silicon Valley has even developed a further stage of cognitive dissonance, and you can now join a cult in an attempt to really convince yourself that bad thing is actually good thing. This cult is called Effective Altruism, and is only open to the biggest brains in the business (does the name Sam Bankman-Fried mean anything to you?). It involves performing a kind of citizen science to conclusively prove beyond reasonable doubt that bad thing is actually good thing. And that really puts the whole thing to bed, right?
And while all of that is good fun to goof on, the truth is that I actually get it - because at the end of the day no one knows what the hell is going on. No one knows what is wrong or right and what will make the world worse or better. No one would be surprised to wake up tomorrow and just have to accept that from now on the sky is pink, not blue. We're in the middle of this insanely complex system and anyone who tells you they understand it, and can tell you what actions you should do to control it for this or that outcome, is basically deluded. Has your friend's mum actually done a study on if littering increases employment or not? No? Then tell her to sit down. Because on the scale of crazy and unexpected things that turned out to be true, littering increasing employment would basically not even register.
It doesn't help that the raw size of the world means individual actions are effectively meaningless and everything we do is part of some insane chain of logistics. I don't make (cook?) my own mints, and I don't make (form?) my own plastic containers, so perhaps it would also be stupid for me to pick up my own mints when they spill all over the junction, and if everyone did that - the only result would be mysterious traffic jams in Trois Rivieres. For all I know this business guy was in a hurry because he was a lawyer late to a case where he was trying to stop a company dumping thousands of gallons of toxic waste into the St-Laurent. Meanwhile here I am dunking on him relentlessly for having butterfingers.
So given all of that, why not choose to believe something crazy? In particular if believing that crazy thing aligns with you making a lot of money?
But honestly, probably the thing that resonates with me the most is simply that believing crazy things and arguing in support of them is just very fun. Have you ever seen footage from a flat-earther conference? Those guys are having an absolute blast. I'm genuinely jealous of them. Attending a flat-earther conference is pretty much the exact polar opposite experience to having your friend's mum tell you to pick up your litter you just dropped.
The only problem with flat-earther conferences comes if you have to get a long flight to attend. Because you really don't want to be sitting on that plane for a long time with that little voice in your head nagging at you all the time. Better to arrive quickly and get swept up in the whirlwind before the little voice and things it's saying have a chance to linger and set in.
As a Machine Learning guy I like to think of the little voice as your own personal local gradient signal. Because the level it works at is pretty much: "I don't like when the streets are full of litter", "litter can only happen if people drop litter", "I am people", "therefore I should not drop litter". This is very nice, because while the world is full of people shouting and pointing us in various directions telling us that the global minima is here, there and everywhere - they can't get at your little voice. And if you just focus on the little voice - on taking little steps and trying to leave things in a better state than the way you found them - it does feel like in the vast multi-dimensional complex world, it is actually possible to move in the right direction.
In other words, while I try very hard to avoid posting about politics on this blog, as there is nothing that makes the internet a more miserable place than politics, I'm going to be bold for once and stake my post on the following extreme statement:
Respectable people don't Litter.
There - I said it - and if your reaction to that is one of uneasiness - look I'm not your friend's mum - I can't force you to do anything - if you want to go to that flat-earther conference I can't stop you - I just hope that the little voice in your head is not completely dead yet.