https://www.thoughtco.com/catch-22-quotes-739155 (chapter 9)
I always think of Jerry (or "Larry") in Parks and Rec, who, as the final episode tells us, served 11 terms as Pawnee mayor (yes, I know he had a perfect family life). Being mediocre is unthreatening. If you're mediocre but personable and even-tempered, the top job somewhere is just waiting for you.
What’s even crazier is that I’ve had scenarios where I needed something and my supervisors made it seem like it would take eons to get it because they don’t understand it. They’d want me to write a report or something to that effect. Same five minute conversation revisited with him in the room? He listens, asks a few questions (mostly about how it’ll impact our budget), and then says something like, “Okay, sounds like we need this,” and boom! Done.
He’s not a programmer. He has no technical experience or background. He just seems to have a fine-tuned compass for what is and isn’t a big deal. I’ve never had the feeling that he didn’t trust me about something that I 100% feel is what needs to be done. Yet he’s still taught me things I didn’t know. It’s weird.
But I have found in interviewing veterans that a no-panic approach to problems is a very powerful force in business. Some of them say that a military leader who deals with actual life-and-death situations can have a nicely blasé attitude about civilian problems.
Maybe Turing test for intelligence is "wrong" exactly for that reason. It's like a test of beauty based on human faces. Maybe we need to accept that just like there are two different standards of beauty (i.e. face one, in which humans will always excel by being average humans, and the other, beauty in its own right, way e.g. fractals or Bach's music are beautiful), there are also two standards of intelligence, which are named in the article as "mediocre" and "excellent". Maybe it would be better to call them "human-like" and "brilliant".
I have had this many times. You struggle forever convincing middle managers to get something. Then you have a quick talk with a VOP/C*O and they say "Of course. Do it. ".
You have a proposal and data and confidence and you put that in front of the VP? It makes sense to the VP, it's convincing, done.
You ask a bad middle manager to sign off on it themselves or put it in front of the VP themselves? Even if it makes sense to them they're gonna tie themselves in knots about how it might not be seen as a good idea to the VP, and why risk that on your behalf?
However much we trash Google now, I lay out in https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...
how ten managers in a row approved my budget for the movies, on the grounds that "this is good for the whole company." Then at the very end, one succumbed to Middle Manager Syndrome. I went over his head.
Chuck Lorre (creator of Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory) comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron
Avatar and Titanic are stunningly mediocre films. But look at the box office numbers.
Avatar and Titanic presumably aspired to be excellent films as well. The visual effects that went into each were nuts, and Titanic's production values were quite good.
Why legendary directors sometimes end up making progressively worse films later in life is a rather complex question.
I'll start: Spielberg.
I would argue with this, though: "Avatar and Titanic presumably aspired to be excellent films as well."
No, I don't think they did. I think by now Cameron had internalized the screenwriter's gospel of character arcs and what audiences (presumably) want to see, and regurgitated it. "Excellent" to him meant "what people will pay for."
I suppose it's fear of your movie gross failing to exceed your production budget, and you retire as a legendary director anyways. Ah, that doesn't seem too bad. Well worth the risk. But, no.