Hacker News Reader

Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

Fun read, but it feels vaguely dystopian to me. The TVA is very, y'know, bad? And using it as your example of how to control org culture because "It can get problematic if the employees start to question the TVA" feels like the kind of thing you only do when critiquing or satirizing corporate consultancies.

Similarly, I am by no means educated on workplace whatnot in general or the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model specifically, but, at least to me, the diagram under "Evaluating Congruence" would be good parody of a meaningless powerpoint slide if it wasn't real. I think it's the word "Strategy" added in small text to a random arrow that really takes it to the level where my brain needs to start evaluating whether I'm looking at a parody.

View on HN

I wouldn't say it's a given that the TVA is bad. It depends profoundly on who you're asking.

> The TVA is very, y'know, bad?

And so are corporations.

Corporations are only bad when they are powerful.

There doesn't exist a corporation on the planet, that doesn't have power over its employees.

That's why we control the amount of their power. On most of the world, corporations can't genocide their employees.

Just wait until you learn about governments! It's like a corporation on steroids, with its own army, and it gets to make up the rules.

And, thankfully, a democracy and rigorous checks and balances to boot - features that seem consistently lacking in most corporations...

The TVA is bad like IAEA is bad. They're just trying to prevent the crazy.

By unilaterally deciding the “right” timeline and purging living beings who don’t fit in lol

Also let’s not forget kidnapping, gaslighting, and erasing people’s memories!

Exactly. There is an underlying narrative that goes almost unquestioned that Some Evil is necessary to prevent a Greater Evil. That's how we get things like the fucking Patriot Act and this new "TikTok Ban".

> There is an underlying narrative that goes almost unquestioned that Some Evil is necessary to prevent a Greater Evil. That's how we get things like the fucking Patriot Act ….

There was an awful lot of questioning about the Patriot Act; it just got shouted down. I'm sure there is as much questioning today, it's just that the people who prefer you not question things have got better at shouting you down (or, well, more than shouting).

"The crazy" being prevented in that sentence is the life of nearly every sentient being.

That's not true. Just the the life of any sentient being that is not incorporated into the sacred timelines.

Okay, fine "most of the lives of every sentient being." As Douglas Adams said, the major problem of time travel is grammar.

That rounds to "all sentient beings" for any level of approximation you choose to pick.

Also rounds to "no sentient beings"

Is their life really "ended" if there is still an infinite number of them in other timelines? I'm kind-of joking, but once you start contemplating the multiverse things stop making much sense.

It's not made super clear but it seems the TVA does not destroy every branching timeline. By extension we can arguably infer that infinite copies of "everybody" still exist, just in a smaller set of timelines (the ones the TVA allows to exist). So, if they've erased an infinite amount of life, but also an infinite amount of life still exists, then what actually happened?

Is != ought.

Paranoid police states also need to understand system design. And they may be clearer about the conflicts between human nature and organizational mission than public comms allow.

Consider that the NSA built their spooky-STASI data warehouse of all communications anywhere/anytime/forever in Utah. Perhaps someone believes it will be easier to recruit for a culture of secret archives in Utah than in Maryland.

Similarly, I am by no means educated on workplace whatnot in general or the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model

What does this mean?

It means he's just a regular person not educated in workplace theory

That weird chart, with the "Environment/Resources/History" inputs and the "Transformational Process" of "Culture/Work/People/Structure", is called the "Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model" and it has, like, actual papers written about it for places like the "Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nadler-tushman+congruen...

I lack the awareness of the field to judge whether it expresses something profound or is absolute bullshit.

The whole thing reads like something I might have submitted for a high school writing assignment on a dare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com