The Curse of Development | Hacker News Reader

The Curse of Development

ribbonfarm.com

56 pointsnorswap28 comments

This is how nonsense is written by smart people to bamboozle the rest.

This is some truths, mixed with half truths, mixed with made up pop psychology, wrapped in a rug of made up bullshit, served on a platter of popular culture references for consumption by people that are starving for structure.

"to bamboozle the rest." What do you mean by this? Do you suggest the author is trying to confuse/deceive people, because he clearly puts LOTS of work into his blog and I don't imagine he directly gets profit from it [so I have no idea what his motivation would be].

That's a very poetic criticism and all, but I guess it doesn't really mean anything.

The situation is this: Many professionals (such as myself) find the world of business entirely irrational and unpredictable. Those like me are trying to make heads or tails of it and often just resort to humor (Dilbert, the Office, Silicon Valley) which gives us the simplistic narrative -> other people are crazy.

But some of us know there's more to it than that, and are actually trying to wrap our heads around it. It's not clear if you don't think understanding work matters or if you think there's a better source of truth for explaining the massive irrationalities of work.

Either way, poetry doesn't really establish or disprove anything.

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Edit: For those like me who are searching for patterns among the chaos of human group behavior, I suggest the books "Moral Mazes" and "Games People Play"

He puts a lot of work trying to weasel out a theory based on a caricuturized comedy.

It reminded me of some ideas from socionics though, mainly how strengths and weaknesses create relationship types

http://www.socionics.com/rel/rel.htm

That wasn't how I understood it. Rather, my impression is that the theory is not based on the comedy, but is rather explained using the language and situations of the comedy.

another good book recommendation for trying to understand the chaos of human group behavior that focuses on leaders and how they lead is "the dictators handbook: why bad behavior is almost always good politics." by alastair smith and bruce mesquita.

By "this", you're cleverly alluding to your own comment, correct?

It is a model, so obviously wrong, but it can still be useful. It's presented in an entertaining manner (at least to some of us).

The whole "Gervais Principle" thing is a model, but this part in particular highlights the curse of development, which is a very specific and useful model.

It essentially says that in an argument, you have to be much more knowledgeable/experienced than your interlocutor, in order to be able to confidently put down the wrong arguments he makes confidently.

It is widely applicable: from teaching computer science to discussing politics.

When I chanced upon Ribbonfarm a few years back, I was super impressed and in fact, invested many hours of my life to watch 'The Office'.

In hindsight, I was bit of an idiot. I fell for spruced-up language that was clearly trying to mask the absence of serious content or thought. A few good ideas, sure, but they're mostly common-sensical and could've been delivered in an easier manner.

Many important concepts start as unknown, and then once explained in great detail, seem plainly obvious. It took a lot of reasoning to convince people that in fact zero is a number (but zero doesn't exist!) and now it's taken for granted.

Sure but I don't even think that the ideas on Ribbonfarm are extremely radical (definitely not the same as 'zero is a number')

The main problem about this is that the author is basing his arguments on a show. A show written by writers who might even read the same pop-psych. Then he goes to reason from this show, into real-life. It's arguing from fictional evidence. If some of the actors behaves in a completely different way one week because there's a writer's strike or something, does it invalidate his theories?

IRL nobody behaves like people from The Show so any theory with this as the only basis is worthless.

I feel that most of this article is not understandable without having watched the office. There were a few nuggets of insight though, but the rest is lost in references to a show i've never seen.

> If you’ve ever poked fun at a French-quoting pedant..

Is the implication that someone who speaks French is "more developed"? It doesn't seem to me that speaking French represents a more sophisticated argument - it's just another, different language.

your comment on the surface seems right but let's be real, languages are created (or evolved in the case of natural languages) to suit a purpose. The Eskimos have 50 different words for snow, so when conversing about snow I'd say using the Eskimo language makes you much more intelligent or at least more articulate... now I'd also image that the amount of content that went into evolving a language differs from language to language and given this obvious fact some are more "smart" than others ... now I am not on the side of any one language, just making an observation.

The basis of your observation isn't True:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-1...

However, even if there were a language that specialised in snow, that's an entirely different thing to one language being 'smarter' than another. In this case, why would French be any more evolved in general than English?

One good link deserves another. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there... The point I was trying to make is the same. Some languages are more descriptive about a given domain in a shorter space and thus can convey an idea in vastly less time than another language. Now you could do some hand waiving and say we use prefixes and suffixes all the time and you could make up words till the end of time but the important fact here is that people speaking a given language actually USE those words, because of their need to be descriptive within a given domain, and WITHIN that domain I'd say they are smarter by my definition of smart. More articulate, more succinct, more versed (within a given domain), and more experienced. Every profession has it's own language, and rightly so, because time is precious and we need to convey meaning quickly. Words created and collected for a given purpose are still words, just look at a medical dictionary.

Are these the words from the robot voice in "portal"? The cake is a lie.

Y A W N

This starts with:

    [..] the archetypes that inhabit 
    organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless)

...which is quite clueless itself, and mean-spirited to boot. I guess it plays well with the libertarian every-man-for-himself fantasy.

Counterpoint: this series is a brilliant classic.

Isn't the whole thing an over extended joke based on The Office?

Qualification: I need to re-read it and refresh my memory.

That said, I think that for many, it's akin to the first time you take the/a Myers Briggs test. It may not be "scientific", but damn, does that summary strike home.

That was my interpretation of the whole series. The author however, seems to be dead serious about it, like he discovered true meaning of life.

He maintains that attitude deliberately (it's part of the joke).

If you read the comments (not specifically of this piece), you'll see it isn't so.

It's meant as an amusing theory, where tidbits might be useful.

Have you read the whole series?

Did you read the second paragraph:

> For those who came in late: read Part I and Part II first, to avoid serious misunderstandings.

or those parts, in which he defines those archetypes? The series is not really mean-spirited nor a libertarian fantasy.

Edit: fixed typos

that was a... pretty contrived link. I'm not sure how pop pseudo-psychology has much to do with libertarianism.

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