Litost

I'm curious on this one, obviously a technical breakdown of how sentencing is applied in cases like this has been posted elsewhere in this thread, based on past (offence) history, non/mitigating circumstances, magnitude of the offence and presumably offset by how you plead etc. So this is the disincentive side to future criminals and this would seem to be an area of fraud (high-stakes) where you stand a (very) high-chance of getting caught, unlike a lot of other fraud where this doesn't appear to be the case [citation needed].

But on the other side, what are the incentives (to future criminals) to try pull off fraud of this magnitude. There's obviously various psychological effects playing out here (as well as circumstantial ones, great idea goes pear-shaped but it's seemingly too late to pull-out due to ego/sunkcost/other fallacies/last minute save).

But has anyone attempted a game-theoretic payoff matrix, I'm just wondering in the wider scheme of things (to loop back in the post I'm replying to about 11years feeling light) will this kind of sentence actually deter any future similar cases from happening or are the payoff's (financial or otherwise) just too high for this to apply any real deterrent threat to those who are likely to be in the position to be influenced by it?

So in reality, actually this is just really a punishment?

This "managing up" concept sounds remarkably similar to "face-work":

"With people we trust and know well, we don’t worry so much about face, but with those we don’t know – especially when those people have some power over us – we put in the face-work. When someone puts in face-work and yet doesn’t achieve the face they want, they feel bad. If you strive to be seen as authoritative and someone treats you with minimal respect, you feel embarrassed and even humiliated. In some circumstances you might try to sabotage the encounter to feel better."

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/16/how-to-have-...

It's also possible that air quality on the London Tube is much worse than the bus, at least for particulate matter:

"Researchers found that a person travelling on a bus for two and a half hours was exposed to a third of what they would be travelling on the Tube for just an hour." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/air-pollutio...

EDIT: Regarding CO2 levels, there's a 2018 FOI request which seems to imply it wasn't monitored back then, but was within regulatory limits though I'm not sure I'd want to travel on the tube more often than necessary?

"The regulatory limits for CO2 are 5000 parts per million (ppm) for 8 hours time weighted equivalent or a short term exposure limit (15 minutes) of 15000ppm." https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...

Lots of great suggestions already. Off the top of my head, one not mentioned so far is Ocean Warriors (2016) about Sea Shepherd chasing an illegal fishing vessel across international waters. It's quite gripping as a documentary, but also does a good job of highlighting the Tragedy of the Commons that is international fishing and the failure of governments to prevent it.

https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Warriors-Season-1/dp/B09238BH7L

Your comment about "having a vocal minority successfuly shout down dissenting opinions" reminds me of this article I just read by Nassim Taleb (Skin in The Game) which covers "how once an intransigent minority reaches a tiny percentage of the total population, the majority of the population will naturally succumb to their preferences:"

https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...

It's great to see psychedelics being considered more and more for tackling mental health conditions, but I'd still like to see the discussion extended to include:

a) Other ways of achieving peak experiences and senses of connectedness, wonder and awe, be that mindfulness/meditation, being out in nature, flow states, breathwork etc. which are more often accessible to everyone, for free and without needing to involve big pharma and may have less side effects, supported where necessary with the same complimentary (talking) therapies that run alongside the psychedelics.

b) Challenging some of the potential underlying causes, I'm not suggesting this will apply in all cases, but stress/burn-out, financial pressures, lack of meaning, lack of connectedness, pressure from social media, inequality etc.

As someone with more than a passing interest in Societal Collapse, but without time to watch the video right now, how does Blow's talk stack up against say The Great Simplification series by Nate Hagens [1], Joseph Tainter [2] or any of the many authors contributing to this field as referenced in this Nodes of Persisting Complexity paper [3]?

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sbEDS84AAAAJ

[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm

Thanks for this, I ended up down the rabbit hole of David Lee Roth and no brown M&M's backstage which is both an amusing story a) about how the media industry works and also b) of putting something seemingly innocuous but easily verifiable in the middle of a long checklist as an early warning sign of a process not having been followed properly, which obviously has applications anywhere something critical is being done.

Hopefully the surgeon insights in the book are equally valuable.

https://rockcelebrities.net/the-reason-behind-david-lee-roth...

"I consider average travel speed to be a critical metric by which to judge society", is an interesting take on this.

I'm curious as to what aspects of a society it's measuring, what those metrics tell you about a society (e.g. it's values) and what sort of society you'd get by optimising for them or (just being contrary) trying to minimise them.

I mention this as the first thing that came to mind when I saw the title was the 15-minute city concept [1]:

"A 15-minute city is a residential urban concept in which most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residents' homes."

"15-minute cities are built from a series of 5-minute neighborhoods, also known as complete communities or walkable neighborhoods".

"the 15-minute city concept as a way to ensure that urban residents can fulfill six essential functions within a 15-minute walk or bike from their dwellings: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education and entertainment."

I say this as someone who used to regularly commute over 1hour in each direction to work (London) and know of people who used to do closer to 2hours. This would have been massively sub-optimal (by a number of metrics) if I hadn't of spent a lot of evenings in london socialising, seeing gigs or doing courses/events etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city

This comment reminds me of this video, where a F-15C fighter pilot breaks down the "Human Interface" in the cockpit where there are over 250 buttons and various other displays including HUD and panels and a button they aren't allowed to press because it requires an engine rebuild afterwards: https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/06/human-interface-com...

It suggests it was meant to be part of a series but I've not found any other examples????

Not sure about country specific, but the IPCC have a climate impact assessment tool: https://interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch/

Maybe I need to get out more, but I was thinking watching the first video on that page, why does this make me feel like I'm in some dystopian sci-fi game/movie and then I realised the voice and presentation style reminded me of the ingame videos from Doom 3 :).

Anyone else heard of Tim Berners-Lee's idea of hosting your data in pods outside the relevant corps wanting access to it and you controlling what's shared and how? This is such a completely different way of doing it, I'm not sure of all the implications, be that from admin (how much effort) to security (would this be a massive hacking opportunity) etc. https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/tim_bernerslee/

I'm not that familiar with the Fourth Turning and this also originates from the US, but I did find it quite helpful when considering where things are, have been and might be going and how the US is in a cycle along with other nations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

I'd also not heard of Glocalization, but it reminds me of a couple of topics that are covered in Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life book (also a course), around emergent behaviour in complex systems and how this competes with top down command and control ideas (or in organisations as the formal and informal networks).

This is very tangential, but in case it resonates with anyone else.

I was curious to discover recently that to try and bridge the gap between what we should arguably be doing to tackle Climate Change and what we are doing, a group has come up with the term Inner Development Goals to describe a set of abilities that might help with this transition. https://www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org/

Curious if anyone else has come across this, expecially as I've done courses on Sensemaking, Counselling/Coaching, Critical/Systems Thinking and the Shadow (Jung) as mostly just life skills, but interesting to see them grouped together as potentially helpful generally, even if most of them would have to be studied in some depth to turn them into jobs.

The Why (from the homepage):

In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals gave us a comprehensive plan for a sustainable world by 2030. The 17 goals cover a wide range of issues that involve people with different needs, values, and convictions. There is a vision of what needs to happen, but progress along this vision has so far been disappointing. We lack the inner capacity to deal with our increasingly complex environment and challenges. Fortunately, modern research shows that the inner abilities we now all need can be developed. This was the starting point for the 'Inner Development Goals' initiative.

This statement might be more poignant than you think, there's an interesting video here comparing Marvel with Star Wars and James Bond in terms of how memorable any of the music is, because it's almost all cookie cutter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

I think all the points here have value, I've definitely played some really good games recently including some that were mentioned above, but I definitely think there's a general risk averseness because AAA game studios are too big to experiment so a lot of games are rehashed sequels or incremental "improvements" (as in the movie industry or whatever's in the music charts).

I'd put some of the blame of this on the outcome bias, things are judged on whether the outcome was favourable (e.g. profit) not whether it was the right decision (e.g. let's try something different with novelty, but riskier).

As Julia Galef covers in one of her podcasts (will have to find the link), the exec that tries something risky might get a promotion if it succeeds and get sacked if it doesn't as opposed to getting promoted from suggesting something novel regardless of whether it worked. See also "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".

How many films that get critical reception now, got poor/indifferent reviews initially because they were just too experimental/novel for the time, e.g. Original Blade Runner. What will people think in 10, 20, 50 years about Marvel films.

Which? over in the UK has been tracking this issue for a while now, recent articles:

a) Highlighting how some "Amazon Choice" products have scored really low when actually tested (due to fake reviews) - https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/amazon-tech-with-fake-r...

b) Buying fake reviews linked to facebook accounts - https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/how-facebook-fuels-amaz...

c) Though in the interests of posting counter argument, allegedly Amazon are making some efforts here - https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/amazon-takes-legal-acti...

Personally I try to avoid using Amazon nowadays and buy direct, but previously I've had a least one occasion where I've been asked to leave a 5* review in exchange for a free accessory and we've seen really top notch ripoffs (headphones) that were practically indistinguishable from the originals (did a side by side comparison).

Thanks I'd not heard of internet in a box, I love how it empowers people to determine their own requirements and solve their own issues rather than just be another excuse to form more dependencies on facebook.

I appreciate what you and the article posting are getting at, but this is competitive, would it be better to teach your kids cooperation (teamwork) strategies first and competitive ones like chess/poker next.

Not just because it's pro-social and non-rivalrous, there's arguments for this in game theory itself, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma it's often the strategies that start by cooperating and then fall back on competition that come out ahead when competiting in even good/bad actor competitions.

It's interesting that the original article even says this "Playing games and sports throughout life teach us all sorts of lessons about teamwork, strategy, pressure, practice, emotional control… I could go on."

I don't see any teamwork in chess, I guess there might be in poker (temporarily) but I assume there's only one winner at the end?

Our current culture seems to place most of the emphasis on competition, e.g. Education is all about getting better grades than everyone else and then we put people in workplaces and wonder why it ends up toxic?

Obviously you could argue that people being cooperative first would just lead to them getting exploited more but given we already have vast differentials in wealth, I'd certainly be interested in trying it out or what research on this shows?

Thanks for posting this, I always wondered why I couldn't be bothered with the whole Marvel franchise and this whole playing it safe, cookie cutting of film scores between movies makes the whole thing massively less memorable than say Blade Runner etc. Though I did lol at the spiderman bit at the end.

It ties in with a running discussion I have with a mate of mine about the state of music, compare the top 40 nowadays with 40 years ago and the variety of genres and styles on display back then feels much more unique and varied than now or maybe I'm just being nostalgic or maybe that's the whole problem with the need to recoup massive budgetry outlays and post the highest grossing box office yadda yadda (tangential tie in with the recent conversation about OKRs)?

P.S. RIP I still have fond memories of listening to Albeido 0.39 whilst playing Elite on my BBC eons ago and going round to my mates and listening to Jon and Vangelis that we'd borrowed from the library.

That's an interesting angle, which I guess would tie in with 1) Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game concept [1] which would seem to be analagous in some sense to creating community,

2) but sabotaged by a general (lack of) friction in people's ability to move jobs (I'm averaging about 2 years now per company, down from 4-5 years around 20 years ago) and this isn't seen as a negative.

3) This obviously can create large internal friction, especially when every new person brings new challenges (or fads) to the strategic direction such that you can spend more time changing (tooling or process or organisation structure) than actually doing real work.

4) As mentioned in a recent post here, this tendency to pay market rate for new hires, but not to pay market rates to more productive people already working for you also exacerbates this, but everyone just shrugs and plays the game because no-one's invested enough in the process to challenge it (or those that are and do just get labelled as awkward).

So it's interesting the "fetish" for OKRs in many spaces that can make people look good, but how often do they actually track the actual "costly" actions like

a) perpetual people leaving -> hiring -> training/getting up to speed cycles

b) or number of hours wasted in meetings or context switching due to interruptions or

c) deciding to outsource something you've just spent 9 months insourcing to a different company than the original one you insourced from at great financial/opportunity cost (assuming they even succeed and it doesn't take 3 attempts) etc.?

d) Let's rewrite everything in new tool X I need on my CV because you won't pay me market rate so I'm now looking after myself...

Without surfacing these costs, how can you make effective decisions???

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chKZ5BVxTfY

This hidden agenda issue can be very problematic, as you say it might be self-evident based on watching people leave that they've gone somewhere else for the "better" tech stack but you'll unlikely to get anyone to admit to it, unless you're working somewhere progressive and/or with a progressive manager etc.

My last place we intentionally didn't use K8s but we were upfront with our team and hires (it was almost one of the first things I mentioned when recruiting) along with the reasoning.

But unless people are honest about their motives, and this is something that has to cascade down from the top, you'll get all sorts of sabotaging behaviour, especially if OKRs are imposed from the top and not bought into/negotiated across the org.

This gets worse when (due to human psychology and fast brain/slow brain traits, with the slow brain backing up the knee jerk fast brain) goals like the ones you mention are hidden (in shadow - see Jung). Or as mentioned in other comments you get the whole Economics externalisation problem when all sorts of 2nd and 3rd order+ goals (like team/org cohesion, fixing technical debt, taking ownership of incidents/problems or going the extra mile) which aren't in any of the OKRs get gamed out of the system because no-one's tracking them. This would be fine if the OKRs are light touch guides and not excuses to stick everything else on the bonfire. i.e. OKRs are in service and not master.

I'm not sure how you mitigate this other than hiring people aligned with company values/goals/action who are less likely to just be (understandably because it's a jungle out there) maximising their pay and the modernity of the tech stacks they know and foster a culture of co-operation not competition.

There was a recent segment in a Radio 4 broadcast about wool being burnt in the UK because it wasn't worth selling: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106k3

Judging by this article this is because of the rise of mass-produced synthetic fibres and a collapse in the hospitality market due to covid: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-581...

So much for science and the precautionary principle, economics and the power of the free market, politicians and regulation :(.

I also use unique email addresses per service and most of my spam seems to originate from breaches or websites that have since died. My ISP also uses SpamAssassin so at lot of it gets filtered before it gets to me, so the amount I get isn't in any way overwhelming, esp. given the amount of places I've signed up to.

Is there an argument, if you zoom far enough out, they are both strategic powerplays one military, one economic, but both with the same aim to increase influence? Especially relevant if you follow the arguments in here about the US being on the decline and China on the ascendency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

It's hard to see how the US's more divisive approach can beat China's more inclusive one. I assume the reasons for this, as mentioned above, tie into the different setups, America with a huge military/industrial complex and China with a much better infrastructure track record (e.g. compare the high speed rail networks in both countries).

Gross simplifications obviously, but maybe the argument still holds?

Disclaimer, not read the WSJ article due to paywall.

This came up on one of the networks I'm in, disclaimer I've never used it, but fyi here's a couple of articles that were referenced in the conversation:

https://onezero.medium.com/what-happened-to-clubhouse-b347fe...

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

For anyone wanting more details on stainless steel and teflon there's a short video on this from nutrition facts (so references the relevant research):

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/stainless-steel-or-cast-iro...

Part of a series of three which includes aluminium:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-aluminum-pots-bottles-an...

and Melamine dishes and Polymide utensils:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-melamine-dishes-and-poly...

Referencing what others have said, it also mentions the Dupont cover up over Teflon, so personally I'm always sceptical of whatever the current advice is, because how long will it be before something surfaces to contadict it etc.???

Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this

a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well).

b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'?

Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

This is really good advice, to which I'd add:

1) Don't lose track of the outcome, "being critical can easily put others in a defensive stance and make it hard to get that information", this also applies to the phase after you've gathered all the necessary information and need to fix it, if you've been too fast and loose with the blame cannon, good luck getting anyone's help afterwards fixing it or earning any respect for future work.

2) From the OP "This is when we should take a pause before pointing out something is wrong", this might sound weird bringing this up, but Mindfulness techniques as often also employed in CBT, which encourage you to observe the immediate thoughts, e.g. in this case fish out the blame cannon and let rip, but instead acknowledge them and don't act on them are great for developing this "pause".

3) From a Systems Thinking pov, complex adaptive systems often evolve in many small steps, rather than are designed so I'd extend your "But more often than not there is a good reason" to more often and not there may be many good reasons all bubbling away in the melting pot of despair. As an example my last company tried to implement the Spotify Squad model and it was a disaster, but it wasn't just one decision by one person that sunk it, it was a whole combination of decisions taken over time and feeding off each other, many taken by people who didn't even work there any more.

Your comment and a comment below about "frequently reorganizing" notes is not an anti-pattern reminded me of this.

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Amusingly, also tying in with what someone above said about starting a compost heap, that quote has stuck with me after reading "Just Enough is Plenty" by Samuel Alexander [1] (an introduction to Henry Thoreau's economic ideas) whose first preface is entitled "Compost Capitalism".

[1] Available as a post-consumerist 'pay what you want basis' here - https://simplicitycollective.com/just-enough-is-plenty-thore...

Thanks for posting these, I'd only seen Normalisation of Deviance mentioned in these two youtube videos by Mike Mullane and never thought to look any further:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWxk5t4hFAg

and the uploader references some further links:

https://www.fireengineering.com/leadership/firefighter-safet...

https://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/2017/05/safety-in-mind...

and references this book (about the Challenger Disaster):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011DAS53Y/

which has an overview here:

http://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/The%20Challenger%20La...

including these two excerpts I found interesting in this context: "Chapter nine she explains how conformity to the rules, and the work culture, led to the disaster, and not the violation of any rules, as thought by many of the investigators. She concludes her book with a chapter on lessons learned."

"She mainly emphasizes on the long-term impact of institutionalization of the political pressure and economic factors, that results in a “culture of production”."