1,531 karma · joined April 23, 2013
Do you have any evidence for that or is it just how you think adaptation transmission works; and do you have evidence that - if the former holds - these examples are representative of the general case?
It's a bad situation, and I think it's fairly transparent to most people who've worked for any significant length of time that it's not a good way to manage, but once someone is in that sort of situation there never seems to be a good time to move to a better model of management without having to let some commitments lapse. That's a very hard sell to make to the rest of the organisation: Yes we're going to make mistakes, and yes we're going to miss some deadlines, (or need some forgiveness on deadline,) because we need to actually develop our staff.
The situation is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that even where that time is available; you're working on a less intensive project; a lot of people want to think that what they're doing at the moment works. They want to think well of themselves. And there's a certain penalty that people, especially people with large egos, are going to pay in admitting that what they've been doing up until this point has certain flaws in it.
I have seen hundreds of CVs that show no achievements of note - and tend to be more along the lines of describing the duties of the job and little else besides. I've also had hundreds of subsequent conversations with those people that revealed significant accomplishments.
CVs are better than nothing. But there's no set way to write them that's widely known, and people tend to be rather reticent about their own accomplishments - perhaps not even thinking of them as such. There's a lot of value being left on the table.
Full time work is a misnomer in common use. If companies wanted to control how I disposed of all my hours, there'd be a much higher price involved.
The same argument can apply to people who stay in abusive relationships. I'm not taking a side on whether you're right or wrong in the whole, but there is a danger here that people seem to have some sorts of action linked mechanisms that do not necessarily favour their happiness.
I found this sort of thing, can't remember if I used Anki specifically, incredibly useful for remembering dates and percentages and so on when taking my A Levels. There were something like a hundred different studies that you had to learn for a good grade in Psychology - at least the way we were taught it - you could't derive them or anything, you just had to memorise them over the term.
It was similar for wanting to remember specific quotes from books for English Lit.
The vast majority of the work I put in for those exams was just trying to eat a textbook so I could vomit it back up. :/ For which this worked great.
Why? What's going on that you need a program to solve it?
Of course we can note a lack of evidence, or even contrary evidence, in both of those cases. That's not the point, the point is that that's just how reality looks to people in those positions and you have no reason to presuppose that you are not sharing similar errors in whatever you would decide on as "right for all of humanity." You will even find disagreement over what people believe constitute "basic human rights" you will find places, and times in history, where your right to life would have been – and still is in some places – a laughable concept. And even today you find certain rights that seem to contradict other rights, I'm reminded of the fact that you have a right to an education in Germany but that this right has been interpreted as a mandate. Which rather seems in conflict with my right to pursue happiness, my right to be free from imprisonment, and so on. (Granted, people generally don't treat children as having many rights - but since we're talking right for all humanity.) Similarly there are great number of rights that you would think people have but that for various reasons they do not – or at least have no functional way of asserting. My right to control my reproductive system for instance - I've found it almost impossible to get my tubes tied on the NHS because doctors continually tell me that I'm too young to make those sorts of decisions about family. (Or, in one rather vexing case, outright asked what was wrong with me.) Despite being a woman in my twenties who reacts extremely poorly to birth control (i.e. it makes me a crazy bitch). They interpret a right to a family in a strongly positive sense - they've decided that's right for all humanity.
The sort of power you're talking about would ultimately be wielded by politicians, by psychologists, by the same sort of doctors who make decisions about what people can do with their lives and their health who have made terrible decisions in the past and continue to make terrible decisions today. Do you trust those people? The same sorts of people who decided that being gay was a mental health problem? Even if we accepted that you could get together a small group of people who honestly did not desire to be tyrants, even if we accepted that you would only define those things that seem to us on the basis of our current morality as the most egregious examples of violations as mental health problems, there is no one worthy of giving that sort of trust to. That's probably how the situation looks to everyone who ends up as a tyrant.
They have misused that power in the past, they continue to miss use it today, and you have no reason to suppose that they will not miss use it in the future.
It's a bit dangerous if you start defining deviations from group norms; which is what delusions of morality would look like from within a group; as mental health issues without some moderating factor. Under those conditions the person who expresses, 'Maybe we shouldn't kill her just because she left the faith,' is mentally ill within an appropriate honour killing culture.
It makes deviation more difficult, and thus retards social progress, if you're prepared to bring the violence of the mental health system into those sorts of issues. Very close to instituting thought crimes.
There are significant costs to public transport that the article hasn't addressed as well. The switching costs of using public transport, whether you stay with the same form of public transport or not, are significant. The time you spend waiting for connections; the time spent waiting for all the other people to board, and alight, at their connections; the bother of finding which platform your train is going to be on when under time pressures to make the connection; the incredible cost paid when a bus, or train, is overloaded or unavailable.
It's all very well to observe that a train can carry a particular number of passengers per mile per hour on a particular space of track, refer to the maximum theoretical capability of the system when trains are running within a certain safety distance. If you look at figures for energy costs, then public transport will similarly come out as the vastly superior option. But the cost of a form of transport is assessed in more than simply its use of space to move people through or its translation of energy into passenger miles.
Even when one is going to be stuck in traffic, it's often more reliable, faster, and certainly less bother, to drive to the destination. Especially since the bus is going to be sitting in traffic anyway, that's a tragedy of the commons problem going on there but it doesn't change the underlying trade-off. For some that trade-off is so great that when denied access to private transport they can't make the trips at all - I know people who don't own cars, who cannot work 10 miles away, because the buses don't run that early in the morning, or because there is one bus that runs that early in the morning and if it's unreliable they've taken on a financial liability in gaining the job that they'll be unable to effectively discharge because they'll lose their job.
None of which is to say that public transport is a bad idea. I love the idea of fast regular trains that are little bother to get on, despite the fact that most of the time I drive to work. But if one's in favour of it, perhaps it would be better to be in favour of it - in favour of improving it - rather than against something else.
It ends up putting the person who's the least bother in that role compared to all the other roles they could occupy in charge. People you go along with while looking for another job, because at the end of the day it's not your company and it's not worth the enormous emotional cost of fighting them.
"Bob, we've talked about this, I told you months ago that there'd be consequences if you didn't do X Y and Z. That hasn't happened so we're letting you go. We've enjoyed working with you and good luck with your next job."
If you haven't worked with them like that, sure, that's a difficult discussion to have without feeling like an ass. You've still got to tell it to them straight, pussy-footing around won't help anything.
"Bob, this isn't working out. So, we're letting you go."
If it seems upsetting, there's not a way that I know of to sugar-coat not having worked with someone - that seems to tend to make it worse.
One of the concerns I have is that we may end up moving to a very image-oriented media that finds it difficult to meaningfully communicate certain thoughts - and perhaps encourages an audience largely unable and/or unwilling to meaningfully attempt to understand them.
"We built these freeways, and they’re not generating less trips, they’re generating more. More freedom. People want to live out away from the city and drive in to work, or they want to live in one part [of the metropolis] and work in another, or go shopping or so forth. They don’t want to live all in one place like they do in New York."
I'd also, on an ideological note, be inclined to be cautious about separating the consumers and the producers any more than they already are. One of the big promises of computers is that you can automate so much - granted a lot of people are cut off from that power - and I'd want to be going in the direction of making that power more accessible to people rather than less. If I'd had to, for example, buy a specialised programming computer with a programming OS when I was young... I'd probably not be a programmer today. That sort of thing seems like it would be very expensive.
But you may very well turn out to be right - maybe most people can't be allowed to have nice things. :/ Depressing, if true, but not entirely implausible.
If you protect the naive from the consequence of their actions forever, then you end up with a world where those who are not naive cannot do anything because of all the 'safety' that they have to fight through first.
Bankruptcy protection (much abused at that) is generally only available to people or companies who have exhausted their financial resources in an attempt to meet their obligations. It is not a protection that is available to people who simply cannot be bothered to put in an effort out of a plentiful account to meet the obligations that they have taken upon themselves.
It is similar for creative works. If you attempt to keep something updated, make a reasonable effort to do so, and that simply becomes infeasibly expensive to continue doing without suffering some form of serious ruin, then that's fair enough. You made a reasonable attempt to meet your obligations, were wrong in your estimation of them, and being wrong shouldn't cost you everything you have. You didn't deal with your customer in, for lack of a better term, "bad faith" when you formed the implicit and/or declared contract upon which your deal wrested.
Mistakes happen, people should attempt to ameliorate the consequences of that mistake to a reasonable amount in order to meet the obligations that they have taken upon themselves and keep the strength and value of their word, their ability to make commitments to others in the world, high.
That is, I feel, different from simply deciding that one is not going to make a profit out of an obligation that they have taken upon themselves. And the strength of one's word is reflected in how much one will suffer in order to keep the obligations that one has formed. As is the value of any deal that someone might make with someone in the future. Someone's word is worth nothing when it is kept only in so far as it benefits them to keep it, and broken the next moment. I am unlikely to pay someone any sum of money, and would certainly not suffer them as an employee, if their attitude to their word, and the impressions that people could reasonably be expected to take away from what they said – the deals they made – was that they simply stopped trying to keep it the minute it ceased to be to their benefit to do so.
Most people do not act in that manner, if they did the strength of someone's word would be almost meaningless and no deals would be made since the client could never expect to benefit from them.
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As for the idea of selling something "as is", contract law is not that simple. If it were, then outside of situations in which both parties had significant forms of leverage, all goods and services would be exchanged only on an "as is" basis. We would find ourselves in a situation similar to the one that used to concern rail travel: in which terms and conditions absolutely removing any responsibility that the rail company had towards their passengers safety were found on the back of rail tickets. Insofar as one desires to be able to form valuable contracts, to trade things of value, one should desire to live in a system that enforces a certain lower bounds upon the behaviour of parties, and the equability of contracts that can be formed, within that system.
Consequently, while I don't pretend to understand it anywhere near entirely, there will almost doubtless be limitations on the disclaimers that you can place on various implied warranties (though this depends upon the relative jurisdictions governing the contract at the time it's formed.) If one were relying on writing, "as is" on a piece of paper, and getting the client to sign it, as a means to escape their obligation with regards to their client's statutory rights, I would not much care for their chances.
Most notably, as a matter of general principle, (and here we run into a problem, for the law may be different where you are,) it tends to be the case that one cannot form a contract entirely for one's own benefit. That is a contract, to be valid, must be equitable. A contract to the effect of "you shall give me your money, and in return I have no obligation to provide a good or service to you." Is clearly almost entirely, if not outright, to your benefit – and certainly of little to no benefit to your "customers" who in return for their money have no entitlement to any benefits nor access to reasonable redress in the even that they are denied something that you knowingly allowed them to form the impression they would receive. Likewise, contracts generally have to be decidable, that is to say that I cannot form a contract with you that goes something to the effect of, "as long as I want" or "as long as it is to my benefit." It simply does not matter what you choose to put in the contract if the contract itself is void, or voidable due to abuse of certain principles enshrined in the underlying statutes or common law that allow the formation of contracts to take place.
Of course, if one buys a used car from a shady salesman, one has little hope of redress through the courts when it turns out that one was not being dealt with in good faith. That has more to do with the difficulty of making law apply to them, then it does a matter of principle or of justice. It strikes me that apps, for smart phones, (distinguished because Microsoft seems to be calling desktop programs apps these days,) bear significant similarities to the shady used-car salesman model. That strikes me as neither a moral nor a legal argument though - it strikes me more as an 'I can get away with it' argument.
That you may eventually have to pay for those liabilities with a few hours of your time here and there does not absolve you of the agreement that you wilfully entered into in order to obtain those benefits. That risk was in large part what you were paid for.
If you're going to gamble, yeah. Sometimes you lose.
Mind you, this whole thought experiment is a bit silly. If you're going to form this sort of agreement, then you should define equitable exit conditions to manage risk in the event that you're dramatically wrong. At the very least, I'd want a significant portion of my money back if I paid for 'forever' (not decidable, so that might not even be a legal contract depending on your jurisdiction) and got a couple of years.
Now we're talking about a situation in which everyone can be watched for suspicious behaviour by computers, every minute of every day. Where you need fewer and fewer people, so your acceptable rate for false positives is going up rapidly. And in which the military force that can be applied by per dollar is increasing very quickly.
At an extreme, if you can automate everything, you and your mates hold up in a bunker and just gas every other living thing in the country. Before that, you send your robots into the ghettos if the peasants start getting uppity and kill every second person or something like that - you don't have to worry too much about false positives there because the people you need are a bit richer and get nicer digs. Before that you drag those who defect up before the courts and there's no revolution, there are just criminals harming the wealth of society - the war on drugs writ large.
You don't get a civil war when the disparity between the rich and the poor is very great. The poor don't get to organise and arm. They just get arrested at the low end and slaughtered at the high end.
No-one's going to get into a field with you and have a fair old dust up. At least, not unless the dust up involves nerve agents and ghettos.
For the strongest form of the author's argument; that no other system will suffice, ever; it has to be pathological. If I offered you a nice existence with entertaining leisure activities, would your response honestly be to spend the next ten years of your life lobbying for more of the pie? That's a lot of effort to expend - probably without any significant payoff since the return on happiness in terms of extra money drops off - when you could be enjoying yourself instead.
You don't need heaven if people aren't that greedy, (and in my experience - UK based - most people aren't.) Some finite set of resource will suffice.
Yeah. For me it wasn't worth it. I could make enough in other companies - where the opportunities for advancing were higher and where the work environment was nicer - to get what I wanted out of life. So, the money was more something that would have been nice to have if someone had offered it to me out of the blue, but of itself didn't/wouldn't result in any significant lasting increase in happiness by comparison to the alternatives.
"What's newsworthy and novel about today's plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions."
I'm sure we'd all like to be so 'meaningfully' punished for serious crimes. It's better than nothing - which seems to be the usual state of affairs - but it's clearly one law for the rich and one law for the poor.