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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

My working theory is that in many cases, it's one of those absurdities that are actually necessary because the world isn't always rational.

If you're the CEO, maybe you know exactly how your org should be restructured. But maybe it means stepping on a lot of toes and hurting people you have close relationships with.

If you get the blessing of management consultants you can at least say it's not personal.

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This is how it was explained to me by an actual management consultant

Or likely workers on the ground know exactly what’s wrong—management is poor, uncommunicative, or perhaps filled with unqualified nepo hires. This isn’t able to be stated out loud by folks whose jobs would be at risk. So MCs can come in, gather the info, and fix the symptoms at least.

Human beings aren't fundamentally rational. We have to work at it, because it's not in our nature.

A thing to keep in mind is that expecting the systems humans built to act rationally at all times is perhaps expecting too much.

Human beings are quite rational. But they are not rational in the classical economics sense. Human beings recognize social aspects. They also have their own social status they want to improve. They also know that they can exploit their social status and gain advantages, favors, mates and power over other human beings. They know that openly backstabbing one of your key players may discourage other ones from obeying your power, so they let others do the stabbing take the blame.

Yes. I've seen people attempt to argue that the existence of racism/sexism is proof of the inadequacy of the discriminated group, because otherwise it isn't rational and humans are rational. Which is either a concerning level of trust in economic theory or a disturbing use of economic theory to justify existing bigotry.

people are emotional first and rational second

What I'm referring to is that humans don't behave according to strict logic. They are able to hold in their minds totally contradictory ideas on things without issue.

I know plenty of really smart people who are frustrated by this.

And some of those smart people can't see their own blind spots, for example making a completely rational case for why a woman should be with them romantically as the most obvious course of action, and being mad when they don't agree.

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