jondeval

I second this. However I'd like to note that in the later chapters, Cal Newport does develop the concept of 'mission' which has some overlap with the concept of purpose but is defined more constructively.

This is an interesting article. My takeaway is that this British team during the war seems to have streamlined a process for surfacing leadership traits that are relevant in a military context.

Lately, my view on what makes a good leader and what I'm trying to practice myself is simplifying down quite a bit. I've come to the conclusion that if there is one attribute you should optimize for, either for yourself as a potential leader, or in choosing someone to follow when selecting a venture, it's ... technical competence.

Hopefully it's clear that I'm defining technical competence broadly to mean deep knowledge about the details of your particular domain. I think this definition is applicable to engineers, attorneys, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc.

I think generalizable leadership attributes are important but purely supplementary to technical competence.

I think in practice there is no 'they' where some sort of single bean-counter trade-off decision is made to compute an abstract utility function that weighs troop morale against expenditure.

More realistically, it's a human decision making process where everyone quickly aligns to do whatever it takes to rescue the downed pilot. I've seen first hand how US military members think in real life situations like this. Everyone acts without a hint of self-interest around the clock until they have exhausted all options.

In fairness, it helps that it's the US military and money is typically of no concern in operational settings. :-)

Good luck to you. Going through a job hunt is tricky. It sounds like you have an interested company and I hope it works out. Keep pushing.

> They all want innovative problem solvers with deep knowledge but don't ask the interview questions that would show that up.

The hiring process is a quintessentially human process so you're going to experience many different types of people.

Keep focused on enthusiastic service. Focus on showing how you can help the company out with their mission. Research the company ahead of time and build a case that you are ready to communicate to the hiring team. Answer their questions honestly and directly but if they don't ask great questions, no big deal, just proactively fill that gap with good reasons why they should bring you on.

Sometimes I daydream about starting a product company and my thinking goes like this:

Do you have a decent idea that solves a real problem? - yes, check.

Do you have respect for the iterations and learning required to find product market fit? - yes, check.

Do you have years of relevant engineering and product experience and can you build and execute on stuff? - yes, check.

But then my thoughts turn to what seems to actually matter (re-enforced by articles like this):

Are you an extravert who wants to spend all their time talking to investors and raising money? - no, fail.

Are you an extravert who wants to spend the other half of all their time interviewing and hiring new employees? - no, fail.

Have you ever actually met an extravert who you would trust enough to delegate these two critical responsibilities above? - no, fail.

All things being equal, wouldn't it be better to deal with a technological arms race in ICBM defensive capabilities instead of offensive capabilities?

See this is interesting to me. I tend to agree with you and I think I would be in the de-escalate camp.

Now even if that group is in the minority, how large of a minority would it have to be to at least question the 'guaranteed immediate strategic nuclear retaliation' assumption in our models and plans?

When I've read about scenarios like this or the topic of mutually assured destruction is discussed, I notice that the concept of 'retaliation' is taken as a given. The premise of immediate retaliation creates the hypothetical domino effect that seems to polarize the discussion between (1) total prevention at all costs or (2) a terrible mass casualty scenario.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is this assumption of retaliation grounded in the reality of our political systems or perhaps a theory of modern warfare that I'm missing? Don't get me wrong, it sound very plausible, but that is exactly why I'm questioning it and would like to expand my understanding so that it's grounded in something more than just a hunch.

WRT to pay. I tend to have a very simple view. Employers will try to pay the lowest wage they can get away with for a given quality standard and employees will demand the highest wage they can get away with.

I think discussions about 'fairness' in the context of location based pay will get eaten alive by mid-term market pressure.

I understand your point. And I completely agree that many of our chosen mathematical structures, and even physical models are contingent and likely accidents of history and sensory constraints.

I'm comfortable living with the tension between these two propositions: (1) The manifestation of laws of physics are real, measurable, spread across the galaxies, and essentially outside of our subjective experience. For example, I do believe that gravity and electrons are real ... not just real for me. (2) The way in which we interpret these physical realities is somewhat conditioned by the constraints and experience of being messy human animals.

> What reason is there to believe that alien civilizations would encode physics exactly as we do and would recover the same constant?

There is no reason to believe the symbolic encoding would be the same. For example, if they evolved with 8 fingers instead of 10 they could be driven to encode their symbols in a base 8 system.

I think the point of the OP sharing the PBS spacetime video in this context is that we have reason to believe that the fine structure constant is truly constant throughout the universe. So if the aliens have the capability of measuring and reasoning about electron orbitals and their binding properties with nucleus, then there will likely be significant overlap between our mutual concepts of 'fine-structured-constantness'. Just made that word up. :-)

This would be independent of encoding scheme and independent of practical communication issues.

Right. You are touching on the central point of the comment.

Gotcha. I did preface this definition with the word 'candidate' and I acknowledge that there may be good alternate formulations. The spirit of this particular exchange is about whether or not 'justice' can be formulated as a universal.

I shared an argument above for why it can be viewed as a universal and judging by your comment above you are somewhat skeptical of this claim.

If we shift the discussion to allow conceptions of 'justice' that move away from the classical tradition and include modern ideas like 'climate' justice or 'social' justice, I will revert to agreeing with your skepticism.

I don't think anyone can plausibly claim that these more marxist-oriented modern definitions are universals.

This is spot on. For concreteness, let me give a candidate definition for the virtue of justice:

Justice - rendering to each person what is owed to them.

It's obvious that we will very often disagree about 'what is owed', but doesn't our passionate disagreement in this case show that (1) we agree that practicing justice is good and (2) we are closely aligned on the existence of this thing called 'justice'?

Some of that is a stylistic judgement call on the part of pg. He wants to move quickly to his central idea, not enter into a nuanced discussion of the philosophy of mathematics.

I think pg is educated, at least the broad outline, of the age-old controversies in this topic and I'm grateful as a reader that he spares me the details and assumes some preliminary context.

I really liked this essay. It poses some interesting questions, but it's short and it doesn't try to do too much.

There is overlap between pg's ideas and what in the classical tradition is called Natural Law Theory. PG may or may not be interested in drawing out the connection, but since he references Aristotle I have to believe he is at least aware of a touch point.

To give a distilled definition, Natural Law Theory is the application of the laws of nature to rational creatures.

In the context in which NLT developed, the only free rational creature was the human being. But both AI development, and concepts from evolution through natural selection, potentially allow us to apply aspects of the theory to different rational agents.

> That's a rather naive view of truth.

I'm a puzzled by the confidence here. I would assume pg is at least minimally familiar with some of the key philosophical themes and schools of thought around this topic.

> For intuitionistic mathematics ... truth is a mental construct of a proof in a language, and only shared by communicating that construct to other minds.

Even assuming you are fully and accurately representing the intuitionist view, you must be aware that there are competing schools of thought with strong pedigrees, like mathematical platonism, that are grounded in a more realist view of mathematical objects.

PG didn't go so far as to stake out that position here in the essay, but his thought experiment leverages a view of mathematical truth that hues closer to this (platonist) camp.

> The question is whether we can communicate our mathematics to non-humans ...

That is an interesting question, but pg did not ask that question in the essay, and its answer doesn't seem relevant to the point he was trying to make.

I think agitating publically on a pro-abortion position is rare and considered unseemly by most liberals. However I do believe there are many situations where people will find themselves under pro-abortion pressure.

For example, I know many Icelanders are quite proud of how they have 'solved' the problem of Down Syndrome in their country by good prenatal testing. I strongly suspect women in countries like this face tremendous pro-abortion pressure when they consider carrying these children to term and welcoming them into their families.

> For some reason I'm a hard-core libertarian so I kind of hate my own core values. I'd even go so far as to acknowledge that my ideal world would be close to hell for most people. I don't want to be this way. I just seem to have a preference for it.

Honest question, have you ever considered this to be a legitimate data point that would act to falsify your hard-core libertarian values?

That's right. Having a conversation is an art and there is absolutely a role for good faith tactics to help bring out the truth of things.

I do think there are a subset of people who are genuinely open minded. These people are actively curious and looking to iterate toward a more accurate view of reality.

When you meet people like this there are no 'tactics' ... it's just about presenting the truth in good faith as you see it and listening actively to understand their point of view.

The problem I encounter is that many people posture as 'open-minded', but in reality they want to hear your opinion for the same reason an opponent wants you to show your cards after they've folded to a successful poker bluff. In this case it simply tells them "what side you're on" or "which tribe you belong to".

As a heuristic, I've found it's very difficult to formulate thoughtful questions if you're not genuinely curious about a topic. Therefore, I tend to use the 'questioning level of thoughtfulness' (QLOT) of my discussion partner as the signal of whether or not I'm dealing with someone who desires a good faith discussion.

I find this proposal problematic. There is a world of difference between reporting on a violation in your community because you're a concerned citizen, and directly incentivizing citizens to report on each other.

I'm sure you can find some small counter examples, but by and large the US has never had a history of augmenting law enforcement by way of private citizens. We are not a country of snitches.

I agree with this. I find it so weird that there exists a strong cultural stereotype with a narrative that young people are more independent minded and rebellious. I can very often predict the opinion people in their 20's with very few prior data points. However I find myself much more reserved when opening new conversations with middle aged folks since I'm so often surprised by their humor, independent thoughts, and unique experience.

I suppose I'm stating the obvious, but I had a very noticeable youth bias when I was in college and into my early 20's and really needed to be shaken out of it.

I think there is a major competitive advantage here for small employers that know what they are doing. If you are running a small US/EU based company and you find someone great in an offshore local, then you can dramatically increase their loyalty, motivation, and potentially output with relatively modest and reasonable raises.

I fully understand that larger organizations make the transition to an MBA bean counter mindset that attempts to homogenize and commoditize employees, and I don't have any suggestions to change this status quo.

But small owner operated companies don't have to play by these rules. If you are leading a small technology company you should be well aware that there are huge differences in output between employees and your ability to actually know your people by name along with each of their strengths and weaknesses is information asymmetry that you have over the bigger competitors.

For anyone interested, the article overlaps quite a bit with the ideas of the German philosopher Josef Pieper. His book 'Leisure: The Basis of Culture' is a fairly short read and can really shift your perspective if you're growing tired and bored with the cult of success.

I don't know much about this author but it's clear she is well acquainted with Pieper's ideas.

This.

A higher level approach that I try follow is to design a quick experiment, log output etc., as soon as I 'think I know what the problem is related to'. Because I'm very often wrong about correlated events in the system actually being related to the cause of the bug, the quicker I can invalidate that bad idea with real evidence the better.

My longest debugging session were too long because I spent so much time trying to validate a hunch when I should have been trying to invalidate it. This might seem like common sense but it's taken me years to figure this out and it's really made me much more efficient at finding root causes.

Yes. The Bible does include a creation of the world story which if taken literally would lead to an interpretation of God as the creator in sense (2).

But the point is that there is this other sense, (1) above, in which God is the creator. This is the dominant sense and is present throughout the Bible as well as the classical tradition that unifies the teachings of the bible with basic philosophy. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'

This content is nicely titled: 'Creation isn't what you think it is.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o8mGHN9t10

It gives a nice quick and better overview of the point I was trying to bring out. The video here is produced by the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC.

> I don't think the Pope believes what you are saying.

I can't speak for the Pope, but you can quite confident that the definition of creation expressed in the video is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and very likely identical or essentially identical to the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox church.

> I am only saying that I don't think it is a common understanding of Christianity

You're Right! And I stand by my statement. :^) Common Christians need to do more homework.

I sense you just expressing your view on the matter, but I think that this is a very weak argument for God's existence. It's completely plausible that we will at some point in the future have good materialist explanations for the existence of energy or the size of the multiverse etc.