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Comment by systemizer | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else get an immediately negative visceral reaction from this? If I'm understanding this correctly, the aim is to manipulate our sense of shame/guilt to boost productivity.

After sitting with the feeling for a bit, here are some ideas that come to mind:

1. Maybe we should ask why we feel shame/guilt in the first place. Is it "normal" to feel this? If it isn't we should not rely on it for our happiness (or productivity).

2. What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy?

For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool. And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into. And (at least for me), it's our duty to question these ideas instead of merely giving into them to self-reinforce themselves.

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It sounds like you're questioning the whole idea of accountability. The mechanism here is the same as if you have a friend check in on you to help you quit smoking or exercise more or eat better. It's true that you're adding pressure/shame/guilt into your life, but I don't think it's particularly sinister.

The way I see it, the mind is extremely complex, and the decisions you make in the moment may not be the decisions you'd like to make in life. In the moment, you might end up eating a tempting ice cream sandwich, or you might get distracted by Facebook when you meant to be working on a meaningful project. The sort of accountability from the article is an example of understanding your goals, emotions, and habits, and harnessing that understanding to better achieve what you really want. The pressure/shame/guilt here is a tool to be used with care, and if it negatively affects your life, then certainly you should stop or scale it back a bit.

I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful (inside and outside of my job), and I find pride/meaning to be one of the most satisfying forms of happiness. People who don't find meaning in their work might still feel that productivity helps them achieve their goals by getting a raise or keeping a job, thus providing money to use for other goals (like happiness).

Thanks for the writeup. I think you're right: the idea of external validation / accountability is definitely involved here as well.

And I think it's easy to read what I wrote to mean that "shame is objectively bad," but that was not my intention. The intention was more to question (and possibly reevaluate) our own relationships to it.

> I find happiness from productivity because I try my best to work on projects that I find meaningful

In the end, it comes down to what makes you thrive, and only you can answer that. Productivity, in its most general sense, can be a way to achieve that. At the same time, for me, it is healthy to question these assumptions every once in a while.

Yes, my immediate gut reaction to the title was to think, maybe next we can have an app to promote the creation of super workers that produce outputs far in excess of their quota, we could call them Shock Workers. Then I read it and some of the language leaned eerily in that direction.

OTOH I've seen similar things used in a different way which worked well, in places that have lots of ops centers to link them and make them feel like one - you can look up and see the other ops center with your colleagues there and chat etc. But that was less about applying a work/focus pressure and more about enabling communication and keeping the teams connected.

Made me think of the legendary Aleksei Stakhanov and the movement named after him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

>What is the value of productivity? Why does it make us happy? [...] And the value of productivity is something that has been handed down to us by a culture which we've been thrown into.

I think it's more that the business-speak label of "productivity" bothers you rather than its underlying idea of efficiency of input effort in relation to desirable output.

The concept of "productivity" doesn't have to be a Peter Drucker style management guru propaganda. Productivity makes us happy because it's an intrinsic human desire to improve our lives. For example, consider a prehistoric hunter in Africa that's running barefoot with a spear in hand and chasing after antelope to kill and eat it. He doesn't need modern McKinsey consultants to tell him he wants to do the least amount of running for the most amount of food. The better that ratio of expended effort to food quantity, the better the productivity. It's just that the hunter didn't label that concept as "productivity". If he has a sprained ankle, his chasing ability will decrease and his productivity will also decrease. He becomes unhappier. If the hunter uses his brain and notices the paths the antelopes use to the watering holes and takes advantage of those patterns to intelligently intercept it, his hunting productivity increases, and he becomes happier.

In the case of this thread's article, it looks like the author is a freelance journalist and so "productivity" to her is writing articles faster and/or writing more articles.

Good point. I agree the word "productivity" is bundled up with many meanings, and it could be a whole study in-itself to unpack it. Preliminarily, I'd say productivity is pragmatic towards-which one identifies oneself (a hunter hunts, a writer writes, etc).

I've been reading Being and Time recently, and Heidegger makes an interesting distinction between what is "ontic" (a writer writing, for example) and "ontological" (a writer investigating the state of being behind writing). In this context, productivity interestingly can be in both the following ideas:

Ontically, productivity writing a book. Ontologically, productivity is understanding of the way of being a writer comports oneself to be a writer.

I think both ideas are equally important. I'm not sure why I'm writing this; maybe to address the difficulty with pinning down a consensus of what productivity means. but happy saturday!

Interesting! Shame and awareness seem to have always been pretty tightly linked[0]. I think it's normal.

[0] Genesis 3:7

> For me, guilt/shame is something to be overcome, not used as a tool.

Wow, I think I quite strongly disagree.

What do you think it exists _for_ ?

It is good for society that people have the capacity for guilt and shame.

If we did not, I cannot see any other recourse other than fear!

Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame? I don't mean to be derogatory in anyway, but the fact something is stabilizing doesn't mean it is good. I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others

I think OP is saying you should feel guilt and shame if you treat others badly, steal or break their stuff, murder or rape them etc.

You were probably thinking of completely different contexts.

>Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame?

Yes. Shame exists because it gave some evolutionary benefits to the primates who had it, like being able to live in a society and cooperate and don't cheat/kill/fuck over each other as much (if you think we do bad stuff too much, wait till you see what we can do without shame).

>I believe there are better ways to build relationships with others

The problem is that made-up (e.g. of our own making, requiring us to think about them and follow them rationally), not instinctual, ways, are none effective at all compared to innate, evolutionary, feelings like shame...

Good points! I agree the feeling of shame is pre-reflective. At the same time, I think we have the possibility of comporting ourselves in a way-of-being that better copes with shame. For me, By reflectively using your pre-reflective feeling of shame as a tool for productivity feels wrong (and this is personal and I don't have the best words right now to expound that feeling)

>* For me, By reflectively using your pre-reflective feeling of shame as a tool for productivity feels wrong*

Well, with that I agree.

For one, it cheapens the quality and utility of shame.

Following this to the end, could end up with cheating on one's spouse or killing someone feeling only as bad as checking your Facebook page when you should be working...

> Okay, so shame exists because it is good for a society that is built on shame?

I think so, yes.

Evolutionarily, as humans, social inclusion was incredibly important. Being removed from a tribe was likely a death sentence. As such, we have some very strong social drivers like shame and embarrassment that people feel quite keenly.

But these social drivers caused people to do things that were good for society. You felt shame if you didn't contribute to hunting or gathering, cooking, planting and harvesting, building structures, raising children, or other crucial societal factors.

I think you're on pretty solid ground to say that shame and embarrassment go a long way toward the foundation of the society we have now.

I do think shame and embarrassment are useful tools that we shouldn't want to get rid of entirely. That being said, I think it's totally fair to question whether our current-society over-relies on these kinds of things, and asking if it would be healthier to scale them back rather than expand them.

Love, kindness, empathy, etc. You dont have to build your society as a goad to make people do what you want.

You’ve tapped on the fallacy of assuming it’s all about shame. Accomplishment is very rewarding to plenty of people.

Do you know of any example of societies that were based on love, kindness, empathy and so on, and were stable for a prolonged time?

Your argument that it exists _for_ anything is a bit hollow. What do superstitions exist _for_? What does religion exist _for_? What does the shame of being on the LGBTQ spectrum exist _for_? What does fat shaming exist _for_?

That something exists and that people are using it doesn't at all mean that the use is still valid, that it ever was valid, or that there are not much more fruitful alternatives.

Moreover your argument that you need guilt and shame to have a good society is the same sort of argument that Christians use against atheists and their lack of religion. The reason I don't go raise hell is simply because helping other people is what has been burned into my mind as a child. I don't hand a homeless person money because I'm worried about the shame of not doing it, nor do I feel any real happiness from when I do it; I do it because I believe it is my duty (which is the same reason I rarely miss deadlines).

> what has been burned into my mind as a child

How was this done?

With my father doing the complete opposite by being abusive as possible without physically touching me.

:( I’m sorry to hear that,

I don’t mean to suggest that shame/guilt aren’t sometimes (often?) overused.

I just think that attempting to entirely excise them is a mistake (and that they are at times useful in moderation for certain things).

It sounds like you are basing your life on negative emotions only. Just so you know, there is another universe out there, based on positive ones.

By “recourse” I meant “recourse for bad behavior”.

Society must have a way to discourage bad behavior, not only encourage good behavior.

What if it’s pride and not shame? One may feel like they get to show off how talented or productive they are.

Do you feel shame/guilt when pair programming? Is the outcome still useful?

No, I'm not referring to pair programming. That is a dialogue between two people working to get something done (no shame involved).

I'm focussing more on the aspect of having someone looking over your shoulder. Just a pair of eyes to watch you work (which I don't equate with pair programming)

I personally think I would be more productive as a pair, in large part (but not entirely), for the same reason as somebody just watching me.

Yes, I'm not questioning whether one would be more productive (I think actually someone would be more productive!). It's the value of this productiveness in the context of manipulating shame. Maybe for you shame is not a factor here, and that's great. I can only know me, and for me, the act of having someone watch over my shoulder (and only watch over my shoulder) as I work would have some level of shame/guilt involved.

Right, me too. I'm just saying that the shame/guilt applies via your coding partner as well. Maybe more so, since they're a peer.

It really isn’t like that when using it. Culture matters a lot and the community is just focused on actively working in a collaborative environment. It works wonders. I call it “flow state on demand.”

It reeks of "scientific management", a scrupuleless way of exploiting the slaves^H^H^H^H^H^H employees.

Ruthless con named Frederick Taylor looks for a way to make himself a ton of money by "consulting" on improving worker productivity.

"How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the best approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired."

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