Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

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BTW, I just remembered another consultant story the other way around. I was trying to do a banking deal and they sent me a draft that had the requirements listed as checkboxes.

[X] Form 123-AB has been signed

[X] Project duration less than 2 years

...

[ ] Company financials have been audited and confirmed

And the offer was timed to expire within days. At first, I thought this was a joke in bad faith, as there would be no way to have all company financials audited and legally confirmed by a certified accountancy within 7 days. But then I just called some random accountant offices, told them my story of needing a quick audit for the bank and asked for a quote and their time frame.

One company offered to do it as same-day service. I faxed them the documents in the morning, then his assistants would check them, then the certified accountant (the guy running the company) would confirm that everything was in order and then I'd get my result in the evening.

When I drove there in the afternoon with my paperwork for them to confirm and stamp it, I was told that their head guy was on vacation and had never been in the office. But one helpful assistant stamped and signed all of my documents "i.A." = "in absence". The whole audit cost me less than my usual daily rate.

Next day, I told my contact at the bank how things had gone and he chuckled and just said: Yes, they know that we just need the audit to tick a checkbox in our liability insurance form.

In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.

> In other words, while I considered what the accountant guy did to be a rather low-effort incomplete job, he did exactly what was expected of him by the bank and what I needed to get my deal done.

The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in.

Relatedly, I guess my contribution to the broader thread would be:

Almost no-one knows what they're doing, let alone is much good at it—so few, in fact, that society and the economy (and everything else) basically run on a massive and super-serious game of playing pretend. Yes, even that big important organization (public or private) where you expect everyone to be pretty damn competent. The difference between them and some normal place is that 5% of their people are impressively good at their jobs, rather than 2%.

This is what becoming an adult has taught me. I'm still baffled that things work as well as they do given the incredible levels of incompetence you find everywhere.

Growing up, I had this idea that adults always know what to do, at least within their specialities, or at least know how to figure out what they don't know. So far from true. The vast majority is just winging it. To the best of their abilities, of course, but it's still all improv.

In social science there is a law along the line of:

50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of people in your organization.

That has a precondition of an hierarchy with a branching factor greater than two.

I disagree, in the anecdote, the bank knows that it's financials are fine and just needed to tick a box for a silly insurance paper.

There are definitely games that get played, but for the most part people are playing it to get around silliness from other parties.

Right—that significant amounts of labor (=human life) go into this kind of waste that everyone involved knows is a joke, and that the non-joke variety is rarely treated much differently, both contribute to what's scary about it.

aka bullshit jobs.

I agree that the non-joke variety not getting the serious treatment it deserves is scary, I just don't agree that it happens as often as you were implying.

Surely there's a few red flags that could have come up and that's what we're preventing here?

your closing is absolutely true as the majority of all of us "fake it till we make it"

This sort of fake it till you make it incorporates passing the hot potato as well. Someone will get left holding it and burn.

logically, the potato will cool down over time, so every next holder will be less likely to burn

I think it heats up. Somehow the delay tends to make the problem grow

>The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in.

So? It clearly works.

People want everything to be high quality master craftsman type work but almost nothing is and it almost never matters. People like to think that the auditors are going over the papers with a magnifying glass and that their landscaper is applying exactly the right fertilizer for the soil conditions. In reality the auditors are skimming the papers and the landscaper is just using whatever brand has worked decently in the past.

Most work done most of the time is little more than the minimum and that's all the world needs. You can either look at that as sloppy and low effort or efficient allocation of resources.

It works right up until it doesn't: see 737 Max, mortgage crisis...

Perhaps the best thing that can be said for pro-forma processes is that they usually put people on notice that they may be held accountable for their actions -- though, of course, that is not always the case.

And look at all the planes that don't fall out of the sky and all the financial products that don't cause crisis.

The "even rare failures are unacceptable" line of reasoning is simply too conservative to permit our modern society to exist. The resources we would have to dedicate to preventing these kinds of things (don't forget the 90/10 rule) in every case would be astronomical. Imagine if every bit of software had to be written the way NASA rights their software for human carrying vehicles and if every financial transaction had to be strictly scrutinized. Software would be so expensive that it would be used far less than it is today and all the good that brings would not exist. Credit would be far, far less accessible to just about everyone you could fill a library with books that have been written about why that is bad. And those are just two industries(!!!!).

It's really east to say "But the MAX" or "but the mortgage crisis" but occasional failures like that are simply the price of a reality where normal everyday people can travel thousands of miles in a day and have access to credit.

If a failure happens because someone ignores their clear responsibilities, then that is unacceptable

People don't just "ignore their responsibilities" out of malice. Generally people "ignore their responsibilities" either because they are pressured into it, or because they are lead to believe it is the right thing to do in that situation.

Either is unacceptable, of course, but the boots on the ground are rarely to blame.

Presenting the issue as "even rare failures are unacceptable" is a straw-manning / false-dichotomizing of the matter.

> It clearly works.

Clearly it doesn't and when it does, it's despite this, not because of it.

The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented.

Misinformation about WMDs led to useless wars.

The war on drugs is a huge waste of resources because why?

Ticking checkboxes is a big cause of our problems.

Kind of ironically, pulling out 3 anecdotal examples of well-known system failures doesn't make a very high-quality argument that most things being done sloppily most of the time doesn't usually work out fine. The real argument is, that while those 3 things were happening - and the War on Drugs goes back ~100 years - roughly 3 billion other things were also sloppily done, and most of them worked out well enough.

If it didn't work, we would all be starving and dodging lions in a jungle somewhere, instead of writing posts on an internet forum about how a few well-known things were sloppily done, yet didn't really cause that much damage in the great scheme of things.

tpxl and you are using different definitions of "work out fine".

Incarceration and systemic discrimination against an entire class of people does not count as "well enough", in my opinion.

And it's specious reasoning to conclude that if a society made up of untrustworthy actors committing fraud isn't starving and dodging lions, then it's worked out fined. One can go live in a country with low societal trust to see what that's like (Brazil, India, Pakistan, Somalia, etc).

I posit that it's the proportion of trustworthy actors in the system, along with a healthy dose of conveniently timed technological advances as well as luck providing resources at the right time that leads to a prosperous society. There are countless examples in history of a society doing well enough, and every time there is a tipping point where sufficient trust is lost and it starts degrading, or in some cases, collapses.

> tpxl and you are using different definitions of "work out fine".

I suppose we are. I'd argue that mine corresponds to reality in every modern nation that currently exists on the planet. I think they're all doing pretty well indeed overall, compared to the historical record and the current conditions of some of the countries and places that aren't doing so well. Comparing current reality to an imaginary utopia is a whole different ballgame.

There's nothing wrong with recognizing the problems, mistakes, and injustices that we do have now and working to fix them. We just need to keep a little perspective - despite the problems, things are still going pretty well one the whole. Plans that talk of tearing the whole system down to fix a few small problems aren't a good idea, and have historically mostly led to things getting much, much worse.

Power corrupts. Corruption erodes trust.

How do you put people in power without corruption ?

You give them a tight set of rules to follow and limit their power.... with something like a constitution.

You see how it took a mere 200 years for that to get corrupted ?

Change is inevitable. I merely hope to slow the change caused by corruption by doing what I can to prevent it.

The only way to stop or slow corruption is by shining light on it. I support all efforts to increase transparency. Put all those spreadsheets online so people can audit each other. Perhaps it is inevitable still, but it’s the best chance we have.

> The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented.

That's not clear at all. There are systemic changes one might have made that could have reduced the impact at the margins, but ultimately the cause was too much much money chasing too few assets and I have yet to see any plan that would have changed that.

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