From law and medicine to markets and autism, the cost of mistaking labels for reality
During my very first semester at law school in Paris, I attended a course with the deceptively modest title Introduction to Civil Law. It sounded like the academic equivalent of the safety demonstration before takeoff: pay attention if you like, but nothing of real importance will happen here. Most students treated it that way. They were wrong.
That course was not a warm-up act. It was a foundation pour.
We learned that laws are not discovered like fossils or physical constants. They are invented. Crafted. Negotiated. Bent. Sometimes abused. We learned what evidence actually is—not truth, but a socially agreed approximation of it. We learned the difference between voluntary and involuntary obligations, between intent and consequence, between form and substance. These were not technicalities. They were lenses. And once you see the world through those lenses, it becomes very hard to unsee it.
People tend to assume that early lessons are simple lessons, and therefore dispensable. That assumption reveals more about human arrogance than about pedagogy. The further I advanced in my professional life, the more I realized that the things that mattered most were not the ornate constructions added later, but those early distinctions quietly doing their work in the background.
One lesson, in particular, lodged itself somewhere behind my eyes and never left.
Our professor taught us to look past labels.
Not ignore them—just distrust them. Titles, headings, categories, packaging. They are conveniences, not guarantees. What matters is not what is written on the box, but what is actually inside it. And more often than not, the label is not merely incomplete but actively misleading.
Ever since then, every time I write something of substance, the title comes last. Titles are marketing. Content is anatomy. And when I read anything that claims relevance—an article, a report, a contract, a policy proposal—I deliberately skip the title. I don’t want to be primed. I don’t want my brain politely guided toward the conclusion before the argument has had the decency to present itself.
I don’t care what the label says. I want to see what’s in the package.
We are trained, from childhood onward, to accept labels as substitutes for inspection. Potato chips with pastoral imagery. Financial products with soothing acronyms. Laws with names that suggest the opposite of their actual function. Entire ideologies shrink-wrapped into single words so nobody has to think too hard about what they entail.
This is not an accident. It is a feature.
I haven’t worked as a legal professional since 2004. But I have worked with contracts ever since—endlessly, tediously, and often at close range. I was frequently the interface between in-house legal departments and external partners. And to my mild horror, many of the lawyers I worked with appeared never to have received—or never to have absorbed—the lesson that had been drilled into us during that first semester in Paris.
They read titles. They glanced at headings. They recognized boilerplate. And then they formed opinions.
“This is a standard NDA.”
“This is a typical service agreement.”
“This is market practice.”
Those phrases should set off alarm bells. Instead, they functioned as lullabies.
That, incidentally, is why nobody writes anything longhand anymore. Not because it is inefficient, but because it is dangerous. Writing forces thinking. Thinking is slow. So we stitch together boilerplate instead—clauses harvested from other contracts, themselves stitched together from earlier Franken-documents, all the way back to some primordial ancestor drafted by someone who may or may not have understood what they were doing.
Artificial intelligence now accelerates this process beautifully. You don’t even have to skim the body anymore. The table of contents will do. If the labels look familiar, off you go. Congratulations: you have achieved legal autopilot.
And this disease does not confine itself to law.
Those who know me know that my older son is autistic. Not the television-ready version. Not the quirky, socially awkward genius with charming foibles and an endearing arc. Not the kind of autism that makes for uplifting documentaries and inspirational conference keynotes.
My son is something else entirely.
He is seventeen years old and has the cognitive capacity of a toddler. He can speak, but he cannot articulate complex thoughts. He has violent meltdowns. He requires constant supervision. Eating, sleeping, using the toilet—activities most people execute on mental autopilot—can become prolonged battlegrounds. He is what professionals refer to, with sterile detachment, as a “severe case.”
This is deep autism.
It is the wrath of God packaged into the body of a rugby forward and tormented by the hormonal thunderstorm of puberty. It is exhausting. It is relentless. And it does not pause for optimism.
Autism, as it is currently discussed, is not a thing. It is a label stretched so thin it has lost all structural integrity. A vast range of conditions—some only tangentially related—are bundled together under a single, gentle umbrella. It is as if we decided that the common cold and rectal cancer should share a diagnostic category because both involve the human body.
The young men and women showcased on television—the socially awkward programmers, the eccentric college students, the savants with lovable quirks—are not autistic in this sense. Many have Asperger’s or related syndromes. They face real challenges. They deserve respect and accommodation. But their condition is categorically different from severe autism.
Calling all of this “autism” is not inclusive. It is dishonest.
Severe autism is not cute. It is not a personality variation or a social identity. It is a lifelong, crushing condition that consumes entire families. It tests love, patience, endurance, and sanity to their breaking points. When misunderstood or inadequately supported, it can destroy lives—not metaphorically, but quite literally.
Pretending that all of this belongs under one friendly label helps no one. Not those with mild forms, who face very different obstacles. And certainly not those trapped in the depths of truly devastating autism, whose needs are drowned out by marketing narratives and awareness campaigns designed for an entirely different audience.
Medicine has done what bureaucracy always does: it has simplified reality until it no longer resembles itself. A wide range of conditions have been bundled together for administrative convenience. At best, this produces mediocre treatment. At worst, it causes irreparable harm—because treatment that helps one form of autism may exacerbate another.
Most doctors—yes, even neurologists—do not meaningfully differentiate. They reach for the bucket definition. Label applied. Protocol retrieved. Outcome secondary.
Whether the intervention helps or harms often seems like an afterthought.
This affliction is not limited to medicine. It has metastasized across every profession.
Contract lawyers who cannot draft a clause without templates. Doctors who “don’t do bladders” because they only specialize in ureters. Engineers trained so narrowly that they cannot solve adjacent problems within their own field. Specialists incapable of basic competence outside their microscopic domain—and frequently incapable even within it once reality deviates slightly from the textbook case.
They see the label. They apply the ointment.
To be fair—and fairness matters—this is not universal. I have encountered exceptions. They exist. Not in great herds roaming the plains, but here and there. Individuals who still think, still question, still re-evaluate from first principles.
But they are rare. And even the rare ones struggle to swim against the current—as we saw during COVID, and as we continue to see in climate science, where deviation from the approved narrative is treated not as inquiry but as heresy.
There is a scene in Yellowstone where the newly elected Governor Dutton walks into a meeting with his policy advisors. They present him with a project supposedly designed to save an endangered animal. At the same time, they plan to rubber-stamp another project that very clearly threatens that same animal—yet somehow attracts no objections.
No academic credentials are required to see that this is nonsense. But the advisors want it pushed through because the right labels are attached. Environmental impact assessment complete. Expert review conducted. Boxes checked.
Dutton’s reaction is telling. What frightens him, he says, is not that the advisors are lying—but that they are completely sincere.
The right label grants immunity. It exonerates you in advance.
That is why large corporations employ legions of consultants. Not to solve problems, but to rent credibility. A consultant’s label can be weaponized to push through projects management already wants—and to purchase absolution if those projects later explode.
“The consultants recommended it.”
“The advisors signed off.”
“We followed best practice.”
Responsibility outsourced. Accountability dissolved.
In fiction, Governor Dutton fires the entire advisory team. In reality, this never happens. Consultants are fired for political reasons, not incompetence. Their true value lies not in accuracy, but in deniability.
Labels enable autopilot. And most people—90 percent or more in any professional class—will happily engage it. Thinking from the ground up is exhausting. Labels simplify life. They allow you to throw a few inputs at a predefined surface and receive a result without ever grappling with the underlying reality.
This rationalization is not inherently evil. No one can rebuild the universe from first principles every morning. Abstraction is necessary. But abstraction becomes lethal when it replaces judgment entirely.
Key Performance Indicators are a perfect example.
KPIs are labels masquerading as insight. Pre-formatted numbers designed to evaluate performance—of a company, a department, an individual. They create the comforting illusion of objectivity. But they are not evaluation. Real evaluation requires confrontation with reality. It requires judgment. And judgment can be challenged.
Those who evaluate do not like being challenged. Challenges question their competence, their authority, their identity. So they hide behind systems that appear neutral and therefore inviolable.
Reality is messy. Derivatives of reality are neat.
We have become addicted to derivatives. Everything is abstracted, normalized, and packaged for consumption. This makes complex topics accessible to non-experts—and increasingly, to professionals who have forgotten how to think without scaffolding.
Understanding is replaced by recognition. Recognition is mistaken for comprehension. And because the show must go on, this is deemed sufficient.
But normalization and labelization create perfect conditions for gaming.
When I worked in a trading company, I was introduced to the concept of “gaming the market.” Every obligation has a price. If breaking a contract is cheaper than honoring it, you pay the penalty and book the differential. Cold. Rational. Legal.
Gaming requires speed. Speed requires simplification. Labels make this possible. If you don’t have to rethink every situation from scratch, you can move faster and extract value more efficiently.
But this also blinds you.
It prevents genuine understanding of what is actually happening. It enables the slow accumulation of systemic risk—exactly the kind depicted in Margin Call, where a firm builds a portfolio of toxic assets that threatens its own survival. The firm survives only by destroying the market.
In the film, one analyst rethinks the situation from first principles. In reality, this almost never happens. The labels are good enough. The models say everything is fine. Why look behind the veneer?
Back at university, my Master’s degree was in Business and Tax Law. Naturally, accounting featured prominently. It was not optional. The final exam carried a coefficient of four—a decisive weight.
The exam was a case study: a chaotic pile of documents from which we were expected to reconstruct what had happened inside a company.
I hated KPIs. I still do. I also have a deeply adversarial relationship with formulas. Memorization without understanding repels me. “That’s how it’s always been done” is not an argument; it is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy.
Predictably, I could not remember most formulas on exam day. And since we were expected to calculate them, I was, as they say, in trouble.
Twenty minutes in, I stood up and handed in my papers.
The professor asked why. I explained. She asked me to sit down again and tell her what I saw instead.
So I did what lawyers do. I dismantled the case. I described the dynamics. I wrote observations—no formulas, no KPIs, just analysis.
When the results were announced, the professor explained that the exam contained several traps. Only one student had identified them all. Unfortunately, that student had not delivered a single KPI. The grade suffered. But it passed.
When she asked how I had done it, I told her the truth: faith in substitute mechanisms clouds the mind. It prevents you from thinking from the ground up.
Our world is fast-paced. Many situations allow you to coast on abstractions. As long as someone, somewhere, is willing to dig down to bedrock, this can work.
When no one does, it ends badly.
Always.
