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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

This is just another instance of western societies devolving from a high-trust environment into a low-trust environment. In the short term, cheating in the prisoners dilemma of social trust is beneficial for the cheater, but in the long run it ends up resulting in lower economic growth, making everyone poorer.

Social trust is the key to economic growth (by allowing de-risked specialization) and political liberty (by allowing minimal black-letter law.) It is too bad that it is rarely discussed, and has been casually jettisoned by the west.

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Cultural diversity and high-trust are somewhat at odds with one another, because one of the very ways that cultures are diverse is the parameters of the trust they expect. Even two high-trust cultures can interact poorly with each other when the contract is too different.

Take the innocuous example of tipping. In one culture, waiters are tipped X%, in another, it's just in the food prices. Clearly, neither is absolutely right or wrong, yet in both directions, awkwardness ensures when the signals are crossed.

Signals can cross in much less innocuous ways.

It's one of the things I think the "melting pot" idea got right, and I tend to agree a lot of people who didn't really understand it did indeed jettison it too quickly and with too much excitement... layering on a minimal, high-level culture that defines things like the trust parameters, which are often not absolutely right or wrong like the tipping example above, while leaving religion, dress style, foods, cultural celebrations, all the really important elements of a culture vary beneath that umbrella was actually a really cool idea. (In practice, perhaps it was not quite minimal enough, but I think we'd have been better off addressing that directly rather than throwing out the whole idea.)

The melting pot idea's been thrown out? That's news to me.

In the melting pot metaphor each new wave joins the homogenized culture -- adding something to it, but also losing what made them distinctive. In the salad bowl metaphor, each wave keeps what makes them distinctive while physically mixing with all the other groups.

To give you a concrete example of how this has changed, my mother was born in the mid-30s to a Cajun (French in Louisiana, by way of "Arcadia" in Canada) family, and prior to attending the public school system spoke no English. And English was all that was spoken at school, and not learning it was not an option.

Compare to bilingual education.

Oh, yes. The current culturally-dominant thinking in the US is that we should let cultures fully manifest without judgment however they like, forming a beautiful tapestry of diversity, and that the "melting pot" is culturally imperialistic because it erases that tapestry.

Which sounds really nice if you don't think about the details, but gets problematic when you start considering them. Again, even leaving aside the reality of widely differing moral/value judgments and sticking to things we can all be more-or-less be rational about like tipping parameters, some culture is going to have to "win" for this to work smoothly. So, you know, once you start thinking about it this way and start thinking about the concrete details of how people interact within cultures, it completely ceases to be surprising that cultures still physically/geographically self-segregate even within the beautiful tapestry of diversity... how could it be otherwise? It's very challenging to try to go out into the world and interact with the intersection of all possible cultural rules (that is, the things agreed upon by all cultures universally), because the intersection is really quite small when it comes to cultural protocols for trade and such. You could spend hours putting together lists of things that are mandatory in one culture, and verboten in another. For instance, this recently went by on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684152 Even if both you and the other person know all the possible protocols, how do you negotiate which you're going to use, when for most people these are really ingrained assumptions below the conscious perception? (And would not this metaprotocol have to come from somewhere and be some form of imposition?)

And to be clear, I mostly mean this post as food for thought, rather than a clear and confident claim of a specific opinion. (Yes, I did express a preference in my previous message, but I'm trying to go more food-for-thought here.) I've also carefully phrased this in terms of "cultures" and not "ethnicities", as in the context I'm discussing, there's only a correlation between the two, not direct causation, and adding in "ethnicities" can just end up clouding our thinking. You get these issues when interacting between countries and stuff too, which is why it's food for thought in general and not a specific attack. It's one of those things where even a smart person can initially think it's a set of very easy problems to solve if you think about it only at a high level, but when you start getting into the details quickly explodes in complexity. Humans are irreducibly interesting!

Social scientist Robert Putnam discovered this in hard data, although he didn't write up the results until 5 years after publishing the data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

What do you see in contrast to "the west"? I'm just curious what you're comparing the US (and possibly Western Europe) to.

I don't see China as being a tremendously high-trust social environment, for instance.

> What do you see in contrast to "the west"?

The West of a previous time, presumably.

OP will correct me if I am mistaken but I read it that way:

The "surprise/shock" that results from dealing with a cheating/dishonest entity is an instance of the confrontation between past and new Western standards for social trust. People are adapting to the fact that you cannot trust social entities as much as you did in the past.

I would like to add that this is almost certainly a consequence of having governments that don't respect their own laws and broke the sacred trust between them and their citizens. Politcians and government are leading by example, whether they like it or not.

Media plays a part as well. It's hard to trust your neighbors when you're constantly seeing and hearing about people doing horrific things to each other on the nightly news.

I agree regarding China, and I think it will end up limiting economic growth there once they get past the industrialization bump. (I believe they are past it.)

I contrast the west with, for example, Russia, which has a very intelligent work-force and extensive natural resources, but has been unable to break out of the corruption and lack of trust endemic to their culture. India is another example: there is no reason they shouldn't be a first world country looking only at their human and natural capital. The middle east is lousy with countries with incredibly intelligent peoples stuck in second-world (at best) conditions. And so on.

Isn't colonialism is a much better explanation in the case of India and, to a lesser extent China?

No, it's poor to non-existent property rights and corruption. Look at Venezuela vs Chile for an example of two very similar countries with wildly differing property rights.

Perhaps it's the legacy of colonialism which gives rise to the "low-trust" structure of modern India?

A country with rather rigid castes and 40,000 endogamous groups is likely never going to be high trust. "Colonialism" if anything cut against these two facts.

Don't know about China, but they do have an issue with colonialism going back centuries and centuries, even if the Han culture eventually "conquered" the invaders.

It needs a bit more than that.

All the Americas were colonized, and most (but not all) are doing better than India. Indonesia is roughly twice as rich per capita. South Africa is even richer. And Malaysia even richer than it. Algeria, Libya. Korea and Taiwan were both colonized and much more exposed to WW2, and they're very well off.

The poorest countries in the world were mostly colonized, but that's because most of the world has been victims of colonialism. And the effects of colonialism reverberate to the present day. But it's not really powerful IMO as an explanatory variable for differences in human development in the non-European world.

Out of curiosity, do you see any specific countries as having a generally non-intelligent workforce? If not, why mention it specifically for Russia and India?

Add Japan to the list of "the west" about this; obviously not all that western, but famously a high trust society, which also obviously had made a fantastic difference in their economic growth.

I think your read the parent comment wrong. OP is specifically talking about devolving from a high-trust environment to a lower (or low) one.

China (afaik) is just an environment with low social trust.

That's an interesting counter-argument to OP's last assertion (with whom I agree) since China has +10% economic /year while having really poor social trust standards.

Excellent point. Beyond the high- versus low-trust gradient you pointed out is the time element. Our ongoing degeneration into a low-trust state is highly corrosive and even regressive to develop complex, multifaceted economic structures, which differentiate themselves from simpler structures by their exhibited time preferences.

When you select for low-trust options in a previously high-trust environment, you also select for shorter timeframes of activity. Those shorter timeframes directly manifest as fewer options; there simply isn't enough time to let beneficial compounding effects ramp up and hence open up more options by supplying more per unit resources over time. The cognitive load to manage these shorter timeframe activities also goes up per unit returned equity/resources/margin versus a longer timeframe; I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up non-linearly in most cases. None of these effects are reported upon, tracked, or even detected in accounting systems today, except at terminal end stages. The current dominant business culture is yield chasing with this behavior, and that has historically ended poorly.

High-trust and low-trust understate the severity of the phase change, which is more accurately described as a shift from trust-density to trust-sparsity. You go from a state where people spawn with the "bozo bit" off to one where they spawn with it on. You get a completely different political dynamic when that happens.

Obviously, trust has varying degrees and context. In Japan, you can leave your laptop at a cafe; in the U.S., you probably wouldn't. That doesn't mean that we're "low trust" or trust-sparse. We might generally trust most people to be decent while aware of the ~0.05% (?) chance per person (that someone steals the computer.

What is changing is trust with regard to competence. People were never so foolish as to trust all others without limits, but there used to be an assumption of competence in the professional world. Institutions like universities are less trusted, and so are people in general when it comes to basic competence and readiness for autonomy. It would be unthinkable, 20 years ago, that CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.

Right now we are in an era of organizational decline. It's not necessarily catastrophic; it might not even be bad. What it does mean is that institutions (universities, professional organizations, corporations, and even unions) have lost their role as central brokers of trust. It raises interesting questions. Thus far, most of the successful startups have been beneficiaries of institutional decline (and, again, some of those institutions deserved to break down, so I'm not moralizing) and there doesn't seem to be any economic reward to build institutions (as opposed to mere corporations, smaller in scope) up... so it doesn't happen.

> CS graduates from MIT and Stanford could be expected to justify hours of their time in "Scrum ceremonies" (which means that they aren't trusted, which means that their credentialing institutions and work experiences aren't trusted). Even average programmers in the bowels of Fortune 500's IT organizations had more autonomy than the typical "Agile" programmer today.

If that's been your experience with Agile, you've have the misfortune of seeing Agile done horribly wrong in a patholgically unhealthy workplace. You may also be romanticizing a bit about old school way of doing things (I have a co-worker who used to work at a major jet engine manufacturer. They were expected to be sitting at their desks when the bell (literally!) rang at 8:30 am. They were expected to wait for the bell to ring break time in before they went to the washroom. As a programmer! Scrum ceremonies aren't sounding so bad).

Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time, and it isn't supposed to be a vehicle for top-down micro-management. If it's either of these things for you, the problem is your organization, not your specific process.

In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team. It's a well defined point for people to raise general questions if they've run into ambiguity, or cast a wide net if they've run into impediment. To-do lists are de-emphasized; it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing.

"Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time"

And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.

"In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team."

And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?

"it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing."

Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.

> "In my (very positive) experience, stand-up is about maintaining situational awareness in the team." > And how could this not be more easily done with bug trackers and status emails?

As far as I'm concerned, bug trackers and status emails are functionally equivalent to stand ups at a scrum board. I find email to be a terrible form of communication for open-ended discussion and would much rather do so face to face, but it's self-evidently a matter a personal preference.

> "Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time" > And yet, in most places, it devolves into just that.

The fact that some people do it wrong is a straw man.

> "it's an opportunity to pick the collective brain and gain some clarity / help with what you're doing." > Most people don't pay attention to other's updates; especially updates that they know aren't relevant to what they're working on.

I've always found people are pretty good at picking up on the verbal cues when somebody's asking a question and answering it, even if they weren't paying particularly close attention.

I'm dubious of DSM's merits. I've asked people (in small team nonetheless) less than one hour after a DSM what others have done / were doing and usually they couldn't remember.

I personally think a good team leader / project manager and an issue tracker + git annotations is better.

I'm not surprised that people quickly forget irrelevant information. The value is in the times somebody says "hey, it sounds like you're touching code I'm working in, lets co-ordinate" or "it sounds like you're doing task A the hard way, lets talk about it".

On my team, the throw-away todo listing usually goes very quickly. The value is in the discussion it frequently spawns. In my environment, stand-up spawns such discussion sooner and more reliably than CR/commits/etc.

Agile is the gonorrhea or methodologies. At best, it is a minor annoyance; at worst it really impacts your ability to get it on.

> Seriously, stand-up isn't supposed to be about accounting for your time

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No. Stand-up is all about accounting for time:

* What did you do yesterday? (That's accounting for time)

* What are you working on today? (That's also accounting for time)

* What roadblocks/hurdles are you encountering (That's accounting for things that take unexpected amounts of time...ie also accounting for time)

First of all, some kind of periodic status meeting is a necessary evil. Everyone hates giving status reports and justifying time. It's humiliating and time-consuming. It probably has to happen. If you don't have a scheduled, formal status reporting, you end up with impromptu status pings that are astronomically more annoying and lead people to give up on getting anything done (because there's nothing more anxiety-inducing and flow-breaking than an unreliable environment in which you can be expected to give status at any time).

The upper limit for senior people before they start to get pissed off is probably: the lowest of 10 minutes per week person, or 60 minutes for a weekly meeting, or 20 minutes for a daily meeting. So with a team of 8, you can either have a 60-minute meeting or daily 16-minute meetings. With a team of 4, you're limited to 40 minutes for a weekly meeting or 8 minutes of status reporting for a daily meeting.

Standups are good insofar as they allay toxic suspicion that <Person X> isn't contributing. They're like prisons: not innately good, but the aspect of human nature that they exist to control or mitigate is worse.

Of course, most seasoned people realize that the game of status reporting is like playing Scrabble. It's not about dropping the 100-point words. It's about not opening up the board (and getting nagged with follow-on questions).

Now, I believe you that most of these Agile methodologies were designed with better intentions. I absolutely agree. But they devolve. We've seen that, over and over and over. They don't fix things. They make tolerably broken things more intolerably broken. If you're in an environment where business runs the show and engineers just implement (i.e. business-driven engineering) then the right thing to do, often, is to become politically inert, silently learn new skills, and save your energy (slack) while opportunities are few so you can step up when the business-driven engineering regime goes away (or when you change companies). Scrotum gets in the way of that, and by putting such an emphasis on micro-estimates (numbers that will always turn into political tools) it generates politics.

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