The high-return activity of raising others' aspirations
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
> "Teach them to be better than you. That may seem counterproductive. I have a type A personality, and I have decent coding skills.
I've been in your situation a number of times. I also know there's these mythical expert developers out there that I can't seem to find (or afford). So, what to do? A few years ago I realized that if I continue down this path, I'll end up with some serious health issues due to the stresses that come along with having a reputation for being a really good developer.
So, I decided that instead of searching for developers better than me, I would teach developers I work with how to BE better. It's taken a lot of patience.
And it's taken me quite a bit to LET GO of my way of doing things. I had to take my ego out of the picture. (VERY hard to do.) Nowadays, I realize that developers don't have to BE better than me. I simply have to ALLOW them to do what they do without being so obsessive about it. Turns out, even junior developers really CAN do good work. They just need a little guidance that only comes with experience, and then they need me to get out of their way.
Yes. In fact they will do good work, if I just get out of the way.
Stability of the group being the main one (i.e. preventing it from splintering). Who ever is at the top of the hierarchy is expected to resolve the battles/differences unfolding at the lower levels to keep it stable especially when it is in competition with another hierarchy.
Will the transition work? Yes it will because we are at a point where no one individual or org has the power to dominate the network anymore. The network has grown orders of magnitude larger than any single hierarchy within it. And the pressure on each hierarchy to NOT splinter away is huge.
Just watch the guys at the top being overwhelmed. The 2008 financial crisis showed what happens when the network is threatened. It just pushes people to keep the larger network intact. It doesn't matter what their job titles are or where they individually stand in the hierarchy.
Same pressure you will see coming to bear on one Genghis Khan type character after another try to wrestle for overall control or disconnect to maintain control. Things will keep blowing up in their faces with all kinds of unintended and unpredictable consequences. Look at Facebooks fakenews response from 2 years ago to today. Look at whats happening with Brexit pushback. Look at Iran and North Korea not wanting to be isolated. Look at China realizing the impact of a trade war. Look at Saudi feeling the pressure to change. Look at Google unable to get its own employees to build a Chinese search engine.
All these are signs the guys at the top of all these hierarchies are struggling to get their hierarchies to do what they want because these hierarchies are now part of a much much larger network. And the only way they maintain its stability is to keep that network intact.
At these scales we aren't operating like a troupe of chimps or a pride of lions anymore with alphas. We resemble more a shoal of fish or a wildebeest herd. There is no central leadership.
And thats not a bad thing if you have ever seen a bunch of murmurating starlings. It will take some time for the Genghis Khan types to get with the programme though, at a cost to lot of people at the bottom of the food chain.
I almost agree with your sentiment however the prerequisite is that the group size is around 20 people. Earth has grown beyond where that is feasible and TCP/IP ain't gonna change shit. If you think about everyone on Earth in a connected graph the number of possible relationships in the world is 7 billion factorial. You're ever fully connecting that graph ever. And it will never be stable.
It's kind of stunning if you look at the majority of Africa and the Middle East and parts of South American those conquerer types are alive and well and steamrolling the network all day long.
What you seem to be describing is geopolitics. Honestly, not much has ever really changed.
I mean if I were to give a metaphor for how I see geopolitics has changed in the last 150 years I would say:
Imagine we are a group of kids going on a camp. First there is the argument over whether we should go on a camp at all. Next is the argument over where we should go. The last thousand years equates to fighting all the way there in the car. WWI and WWII were arguing over who got which bed after we arrived in the room. The first night came and went and followed by the first full day of camp. The first day of camp was going fine until it wasn't. That was brexit + Trump. A minor hiccup here and there but everyone lives in such close quarters at the moment we are all starting to get on each other's nerves. But mum and dad (The UN) tell us not to fight. One could break out but we try to keep the peace otherwise we know it's going to be miserable for everyone. Full scale warfare is a food fight away.
Human nature never changes but scale which it was never designed for tends to expose the very rough edges.
As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm. If you think about even the difficulty of maintaining stable relationships with the handful of people you know it's actually really damn challenging. Occasionally you have fights and disagreements and sometimes you think fuck it I just can't deal with you anymore or right now. If it's like that for everyone on Earth in their personal lives then that's what Earth is going to be like in aggregate roughly speaking.
I don't mean to be a downer about it. I just think we have a very rosy view of "the world gets better and progress gets made and that's the natural state of things". I've come to realize that that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when you look at the history of the world over the last 12 to 13 thousand years.
As it stands this is mostly a happy accident. Scariest thing is it can all go back the other way.
There are going to be ups and downs. And yes we are fucking things up right now, because exploiting each other is easier than helping each other climb. But its all part of learning. The more we fuck up the more we learn how not to fuck up. And have learnt a lot. About human behavior thanks to trump and brexit. If tech and psychology can mislead entire populations by pushing a couple buttons, it can also do the opposite. Those buttons are being cooked up as we speak.
I don't think we are going to have any more great world wars (people around the world aren't as desperate to enroll in the military as they once were for employment) but we are going to have huge shocks to the system that will force us each time to learn from our fuck ups. It's not going to be a nice pleasant stroll up the mountain. But human nature is to climb nonetheless.
This is something more than continual encouragement or simply being a mentor or sounding board. This is looking at the universe of possibilities and, seeing a good potential, pushing a small stone down a steep angle of repose.
I'm a senior data scientist, and occasionally come across exceptionally bright but self-limiting people. If we get to know each other a bit, I've taken several under my wing and sponsoring their transition into statistics/data science activity. It's my absolute favorite thing to do as a mentor, both for selfish and selfless reasons.
I'm careful with this, of course. The antithesis to this notion is encouraging to work towards something then wasting your and the person you're encouraging's time. Much of this is self-selecting.
Once, during the doldrums after the dot com bust when our old firm had gone out of business, I interviewed for a position that was a bit too junior for me, but a reachable step up for a friend of mine. I left the interview, called her, she applied, got the job, and it trained her for the next one.
In grad school, one of my brilliant classmates had an intern offer in hand from a bank, and they were rushing her to accept it. We, but especially my wife, the guidance counselor, urged her to believe in herself and hold out for one of the big tech firms. She did, had two very successful internships at one of the biggies, and now works there full time. She gave us a coffee mug from the firm, I smile every time I see it.