962 karma · joined August 5, 2019
As anything with human psychology, good to think about and be mentally prepared for where it will work and where it wont. For example it can be counter productive if the people receiving advice reject, attack, misunderstand it or if advice is given to people who aren't looking for advice.
But in the current environment noise and distraction is incentivized and amplified and that makes things like education even more complicated and time consuming.
It made sense when the story was about renting out spare data center capacity. Amazon and Google had a ton of excess which started the story.
Microsoft, Oracle, IBM et al did not, but had to react to Amazon and Google Cloud and had to build up capacity. Then the game turned into ensuring all that new capacity was utilized. Enterprise needing to make the shift to Cloud is driven almost mindlessly by that fact, much more than actual Enterprise needs and issues. Utilization is achieved by smart marketing, a ton of it, targeted at dumb Enterprise.
This feels like some honeymoon period.
For all we know there are a lot of top notch dreamers sitting in the Serengeti today that are going to die there because the groups they are surrounded by can't help them in anyway.
Without the right group surrounding the individual good luck realizing dreams and changing the behavior or thinking of any other group.
Well explained here - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25426
That's why we evolved groups to overcome individual weakness. Then bigger groups to overcome group weakness. Understanding how and why groups form/evolve/break/merge etc will change how you think about what can and can't be done by yourself.
Check out Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation, and Complexity of Cooperation.
Everyone is a click away from broadcasting to the planet whatever is flitting through their head.
And everyone is encouraged to broadcast thanks to Zuckerberg & Co inventing the likes/clicks/views engagement feedback loop.
In the past, if one was ignorant (lacked knowledge or access to knowledge), stupid (lacked the capacity to understand knowledge even with access to it), misguided (had access to the knowledge with errors) the cost and energy required to broadcast was much higher. And there were only finite number of people and groups who could pull it off. That put an upper limit on how much energy society had to expend in dealing with issues thanks to broadcast of free speech.
Countering the issues takes energy. And that is finite.
It's not complicated to understand the change. Take the best, most compassionate, patient, empathetic teacher you have and put him in a classroom with 10 misbehaving kids (all incentivized to misbehave) You will still see good teachers having a positive effect on all of them. Make it 30 misbehaving kids and things get trickier. Make it 500 and you will have the building burning down. Some magic process will have to generate more teachers to counteract the increase.
Social media and the news media have given us scale to Broadcast and rigged the game to prop up whoever/whatever gets engagement, without giving us a proportionate increase to respond to all the issues that also scale up.
We haven't invented empathy at scale yet. And it doesn't make sense to try while social media/news media rewards all kinds of bullshit. Likes/clicks/views counts need to be hidden otherwise the misbehaving kid gets mixed signals even if you apply empathy.
The key is awareness of the important concepts of the field.
Most managers have very little awareness of the field. And under time and resource pressure, come up with their own half baked theories and solutions which seed further issues and compound misunderstanding.
Connie Sachs + machine >> Connie Sachs | machine
There is a lot of overlap, because both are about gaining power and influence, but there are big differences in needs, resources and routes taken. It's easy to misunderstand them.
Google, thanks to the amount of info they sit on and decisions they make about how it flows, is stuck bang in the middle of those two worlds. Other corps sit in that intersection too such as oil/energy, defense, banking, media etc but none of them have achieved info scale that Google has.
This is still early days where traditional Politicians/Parties (other than the Chinese) haven't fully processed what those info flows can do to them.
They recognize now, how important corps sitting on top of mountain ranges of data are. But the moment they loose power and influence because of those info flow is when real awakening happens. It's safe to assume Real World Politics will dominate Org Politics within such corps. Things will break apart just as they did with Newspapers and TV/Radio News.
At an individual level it's always good to think about what your needs are and be conscious of them. People who aren't, just get dragged by whatever chaos is unfolding thinking they have no role to play or choice. Those that are in touch with their needs and values experience the whole story very differently.
Travel along an Indian highway and try to find your standard roadside motel as you would in US ala Best Western. There are no low-mid tier chains.
What OYO is promising is scale. What Best Western took 50 years to do these guys want to do in 5 or 2 idk.
It's a worthwhile bet given the Indian consumers purchasing power/quality expectations are on the rise. It's not at all a big stretch to imagine such chains existing in India 10 years from now. Someone is going to build it. You can always ask the established chains in the west and they will tell you how long they think it will take.
Now if you asked a AT&T, Comcast or Vodafone whether they could role out a 4G network with 300 million users in 3 years across India, I don't think any of them would think it possible. But Reliance Jio did it anyway.
The textbook on how fast you can scale things is being rewritten. In that context what OYO does pull off is going to be interesting to watch.
Try getting your avg software engineer to get out from behind a desk, and go have a conversation with someone they have issues with.
The new dimension these days is how many people you can rally to your cause and how fast you can do it. Social media and news media amplification gives anyone that power. It can be used and misused and managers are learning how to deal. It's all new so expect good and bad outcomes.
But don't expect people to stop pushing their agendas.
All this depends on the experience level of the boss you work for. There are lot of oversensitive influencial customers out there, not just the Chinese Govt.
>encourage writing a lot of plain text around your code
Is this targeted at non techies? Teachers?
Can someone provide some good example of this? Not having used it much trying to understand what the advantages are over good quality documentation/tutorial pages on say msdn.
https://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_me...
Hope you guys learn from those lessons. And all the best.
Let them go find their own path, and while they do that, some tolerance for whatever work-in-progress philosophy they might spout, is not a bad thing.
Nobel winner Richard Thaler -
"I would never deny being lazy, but did Danny(Daniel Kahneman) thinks that my laziness was my single best quality? To this day, Danny insists it is. My laziness, he claims, means I only work on questions that are intriguing enough to overcome this default tendency of avoiding work.'
"thriving and survival in an unstable future" doesn't mean following just one route. Nature shows us there are a whole bunch of routes. From the cactii to the banyan tree you can find value in all of them or what best suits you.
Access to a good network. It's not like cash isn't available these days. It's just that you have to treat networking as a full time job and hone the craft just as you would anything technical.
From Niall Ferguson's- The Square and the Tower
"The Times noted in 1863, the history of the Saxe-Coburgs showed ‘how much one success leads to another in Princely life’. Augusta of Saxe-Coburg’s grandchildren included not only both Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, but also Ferdinand, who married the Queen of Portugal, and Leopold’s son, namesake and heir to the Belgian throne.
The Saxe-Coburgs were further linked by marriage to the Orléans family and the Habsburgs. Moreover, Victoria and Albert’s eldest child was not the only one to marry royally: all but one of their nine children did. Thus, besides Frederick William of Prussia, Queen Victoria’s sons-in-law included Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and Henry of Battenberg, whose brother Alexander became prince of Bulgaria, while her daughters-in-law included Princess Alexandra of Denmark and Princess Marie, daughter of Tsar Alexander II and sister of Tsar Alexander III. By the time the future Nicholas II arrived in London for his first visit to England, in 1893, a family reunion had come to resemble an international summit:
'We drew into Charing Cross. There we were met by: Uncle Bertie [the future Edward VII], Aunt Alix [Alexandra of Denmark], Georgie [the future George V], Louise, Victoria and Maud [his sisters, the last of whom would marry Prince Carl of Denmark, later Haakon VII of Norway] … Two hours later Apapa [Christian IX of Denmark], Amama and Uncle Valdemar [of Denmark] arrived. It is wonderful to have so many of our family gathered together … At 4.30 I went to see Aunt Marie [wife of Alfred, duke of Saxe-Coburg] at Clarence House and had tea in the garden with her, Uncle Alfred, and Ducky [their daughter, Victoria Melita].3
When this last married Ernest Louis, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt the following year, the guests included an emperor and empress, a future emperor and empress, a queen, a future king and queen, seven princes, ten princesses, two dukes, two duchesses and a marquess. They were all related"
"In 1894, Queen Victoria was pleased to be addressed as ‘Granny’ by the future Tsar Nicholas II, after his betrothal to yet another of her granddaughters, Alix of Hesse.6 With ‘Willy’ (her grandson William II of Germany) corresponding cheerfully with his cousins ‘Nicky’ and ‘George’,7 it seemed for a time as if the vision that had inspired Leopold I had been realized: from Athens to Berlin, from Bucharest to Copenhagen, from Darmstadt to London, from Madrid to Oslo, from Stockholm to Sofia and even in St Petersburg, the Saxe-Coburgs ruled."
People who work on things that nobody in their group has good answers for, become much more aware of other disciplines and the histories, as they go looking for better answers.
But if entering a group working on known paths, or existing ideas (being tested), then wandering too far from base camp is going to look unfocused. The existing path has to hit a dead end. Which in many fields/professions takes decades.
Herbert Simon started off with Political Science. But look where the path takes him as he doesn't find answers on what he is working on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon