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It's also magical that given all this, everything still works! The products get shipped, the people get paid, the world benefits! Think of it this way -- human behavior is much weirded than one would naively expect, and we manage to self-organize to accomplish all this crazy stuff! Isn't that pretty cool?

Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.

Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.

When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.

From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!

There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

It can be a painful, frustrating, degrading, and ultimately extremely valuable lesson.

It's especially difficult if you're naive because everyone around you is talking about metrics and OKRs, you agree on OKRs with people, and everyone seems to be working toward their OKRs. Everything seems so objective! It takes quite a bit of experience to internalize that (a) metrics have a lot of momentum and lag, (b) shit changes too fast anyway, (c) managers will move teams/groups way before the goals materialize, and (d) by the time they've moved nobody will remember what happened two quarters ago.

So while everyone is talking about the OKRs, nobody who isn't hopelessly naive actually cares about them (beyond the top line stuff executives see). Your manager doesn't care at all if you meet your objectives. They just want to look good until they can move to bigger responsibilities. Sometimes that happens to align with meeting explicit objectives, but quite often there is no alignment at all.

The people who understand the covert goals will do well very well for themselves (at least until the future eventually catches up to them). The people who naively work on their OKRs usually will not.

That's a positive change. But it also ought to be possible to say "this is a dumb idea" or to engage in friendly ribbing when someone does something dumb. These are good, healthy mechanisms in normal groups of people. Eliminate all teasing, and everyone is friendly on the outside and bitter and resentful on the inside. People should be teased for breaking things. There is such a thing as attempting to be too professional.

The flipside of being too diplomatic is that everything shifts too slowly for people to notice, and by the time they have noticed they're boiled like a frog. That's why SF police basically doesn't work at all, there are tent cities and needles on the streets, and a tiny bedroom costs $2k/mo. That's why everyone is using Jira and nobody likes it. That's why 90% of corporate meetings are a complete waste of time.

Small diplomatic concessions compound and lead to equilibrium traps where it's no longer possible to say "enough is enough". There are plenty of situations where being an asshole is much, much better than the alternative.

Have you been to a corporate meeting? It feels like soul death for precisely this reason -- nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all.

Tech/open-source was one of very few domains where people did say the thing they wanted to say. The culture selected for people who want to interact that way, and then encouraged that form of interaction.

Now that's dead. Codes of conduct, inclusion, and caring about people's feelings are lofty ideals, but if people can't say "it's a stupid idea" when they think "it's a stupid idea" the whole thing will disintegrate into a dilbertesque nightmare along with the rest of the corporate America.

I'll take an asshole over a pushover any day, and most of us are pushovers.

Big things are easy to notice because they're big. Little things are difficult to notice because they're little. Doubly so if they aren't immediate.

In my experience the little things are at least as important to productivity as the big things.

It is both. If the method works, this group of people won't profit from non-profits in exchange for nothing -- they'll get paid for picking non-profits that accomplish their declared goals.

Suppose $X is spent on non-profit donations, and Y% of non-profits don't meet their goals. Then only $X * (1 - Y) is deployed in a meaningful way, and $X * Y is wasted -- it's the hidden cost (Hc) of today's allocation mechanism. So long as the investors get paid less than Hc, contributing $X to the donor fund instead will result in a strictly better world.

I think this is promising. I would definitely consider contributing to this fund.

WhatsApp is such a dramatically better product in exactly the same way Skype never was. The UI is straightforward, it never crashes, finding people is a breeze, and I can call, chat, and share rich media so seamlessly I basically forget I'm doing it.

The world has moved on. Skype was a good product for its time, but I'm not sorry to see it go.

My parents dedicated their entire lives to me. It was all about me, and nothing for them. While I'll be forever grateful for what they've done for me, I find myself struggling building a meaningful life as an adult. I seriously think my life now would be dramatically better if my dad did something as simple as go play soccer himself once a week when I was growing up (and occasionally have me watch him play).

But that's not the right way to frame it. We have some amount of money to spend, and we need to figure out how to deploy it. We know that in aggregate basic research has resulted in astronomical payoffs over time. Therefore it's in our interest to put money into basic research. It's not the scientists who should provide convincing justification on why they deserve our money. It's us who should provide convincing justification why more people should become scientists.

> Your clothes, your food, your house, your job, everything is the result of path-dependent evolution that didn't have to end up how it did.

For example, we have a lot of wheat in our diet because wheat was convenient to grow in certain climates, and the countries that grew it ended up colonizing half the world (I'm not a food historian, but for argument's sake this is probably correct enough).

So there is a reason why we eat a lot of wheat; there is a reason why our clothes are cut the way they are; there is a reason why our cities look the way they do. Whether we know it or not, there is a good reason for almost everything. It may be the result of path-dependent evolution, but it isn't arbitrary.

I think Burning Man errs far too much on the side of "everything about society is made up, and you can make it different". There are lots of rules about how the tapestry is woven that aren't made up. If you want to change the world you have to be aware that many (most?) things happen for a good reason. It's not just all imaginary.

Could you explain what you mean? This seems important, but I don't understand the phrase at all.

The side effect of such a policy is that hospitals will then have huge incentives to perform the cheaper procedure. E.g. if the real price of C-section is higher than the real price of vaginal birth, but the effective price for both is mandated by the government, then hospitals will have too much pressure not to perform C-sections (even when they'd result in better outcomes for the patient).

> In fact, I don’t think I’ve cared about prestige since 2010

Yeah, right. We're all wired to seek prestige. If we don't get it we wither and sulk. He just figured out that he's unlikely to get it via traditional means, and decided to seek it via an alternative route. Perhaps there are extremely rare mentally atypical people who really don't care about prestige, but it almost certainly isn't you or me or the blogger. Be careful about the lies you tell yourself.

This specific question implies that there is a power imbalance between you and the recruiter. Implying such a thing is slightly rude (even if the power imbalance is there, the social convention is to ignore it). So, how do you want to handle someone being slightly rude?

You could play the game on their terms, and just list your skills/characteristics. Of course the recruiter already knows them, so the signal you're sending is obedience in the face of slight rudeness.

You could be a little more forceful and (politely) say something like this: "before we talk about that I'd like to better understand which problems you need me to see if there is a fit between my skills and the needs of your organization."

You could be even more forceful and respond to slight etiquette transgression with a follow up transgression. For example, "I don't quite think this is the right framing, I'd like to first understand why I should work for you."

It's just a game, a dance. Don't think about it literally and play with the steps.

This is good advice for most situations where people might get nervous and don't automatically know what to do (e.g. meeting a stranger).

The usual advice is "just treat disabled people as people" but it isn't super useful because humans don't "naturally" treat anyone like anyone. Much of our social interaction is cultural and learned. So it's extremely helpful to give specific, actionable advice ("just tell your child to wave").

I have to admit to occasionally looking away, or doing other things mentioned in the article. It's not because I think disabled people are "worse" or because I'm an asshole. It's because I get a momentary "shit, this isn't automatic, what do I do" feeling, and by the time I arrive at a conscious decision of what to do a few moments later it's too late.

There is a lot of shaming of people that I think would be much better replaced with education. Most people aren't assholes. They just don't automatically know what to do. We can fix it by giving people specific actionable norms.

Note an important caveat -- a centralized third party can also provide such a service. So you have to further subdivide the space into use cases where the blockchain has to compete against such services, and use cases where a public ledger is desirable in and of itself.

I wrote down resolutions before and never stuck to them. Beeminder is a gamechanger.