Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for politics, oh god, please, no. The guy with the nuclear launch codes should not be the best entertainer.
Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quote about it, something along the lines of the most good being done in the history of man by people throwing cats into temples.
I'd actually be curious to see an analysis of this. All of my experience suggests that there is indeed a significant difference in employee quality and a substantial cost imposed by turnover, but I'd love to see some data to the contrary, i.e. that the "employee as interchangeable cog" model is defensible.
If you think about this from a game theoretic perspective, it makes business sense to "defect" first (make this offer to employees). If all firms could be trusted to cooperate, they could pressure workers to return and workers wouldn't have any recourse. But because the first firm that defects has its pick of the remote talent litter, the slower you move the worse off you are.
Sorry to be that guy, but it's funny to me Seneca identified this exact thing thousands of years ago. He said something like, we must not take on tasks which are not so much huge as generate a proliferation of smaller tasks.
I think the biggest place where it's really necessary is integration points. Within your system it's reasonable
to try to define exceptions out of existence. Once you start accepting user input or depending upon some system outside of your control, though, you better have some kind of mechanism to handle whatever unknown asteroids come flying in from deep space ready to annihilate your entire planet and civilization.
I did a quick search for the article "How to Ruin Motivation With Pay" but it's behind a paywall. The book "Punished By Rewards" has a lot of references if you're interested.
The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less than they are, even if I can bring myself to admit to myself that they're better at the job, I'm still going to feel we're "doing the same job" and I'm getting screwed. Those people don't immediately and quietly
just look for a new job. They complain and moan and poison the well and generally destroy the social atmosphere of the company.
Studies of workplace motivation and performance often find that one of the worst things you can do is get everyone obsessing about salary all of the time instead of focusing on the work. (Notably, this isn't just bad for the company, it's bad for the workers' quality of life.) I think it's fair to say that sometimes companies are trying to screw the workers, but I also think some of the norms around discretion on this topic were an informal evolved mechanism to dampen the natural status competition people fall into and get them to work more as a unit focused on a goal. While I appreciate the aim behind transparency laws, I'd prefer it if certain things like choosing to talk about salary were protected. Publishing all of the salaries by default seems like a blunt mechanism and strikes me as very libertarian or Marxist thinking where you're either assuming a) a free and transparent market always produces the best result, or b) people fall into broad "classes" in which all individuals share the same interests and will work together. I generally think both of those modes of thought are simplistic and, despite some underlying truth, fail to account for many important complications and unintended side effects.
I was using the word "animal" in the sense of "non-human." The point is that non-human intelligence is particularly difficult and complicated for us to discuss, because no member of our species has experienced it and so we can only reason about it through complex experiments and logic. We can't lean on things like personal experience and language in our investigations of it.
Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing it because of the mismatch in non-verbal cues. I for example often find myself completely unable to parse the facial expressions and body language of my cat, yet she is very obviously a reasonably intelligent animal.
Not OP, but I imagine it's something like "precision" vs. "how often correct." So you can be extremely precise quickly, but not all the time. Or you can be extremely precise all the time, but not in time to make good decisions. Et al.
Fair point, but it's a useful shorthand for "assembles a vast profile via collection of your data in an effort to manipulate your behavior." Part of Zuboff's book is about this very thing. This is an entirely new economic model in history and therefore we lack useful language to describe it, and since we struggle to describe it we struggle to criticize and oppose it.
Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free and great service (like Google Maps) at the exact same time I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data. This is exactly what makes it so fraught. People aren't objecting to cheap phones, they're objecting to the continued commercialization and manipulation of human experience.
I'd rather be flagged as someone who gives a shit about privacy and autonomy than passively accept the further degradation of those things. If we all treat this as a tragedy-of-the-commons situation and impotently accept whatever these companies do in order not to raise a fuss and draw attention to ourselves, then the future is inevitable and the world will go further down this path than it already has. The presumption of guilt is fucking ridiculous and I won't be a party to it, nor will I run and hide.
This is my approach. If sovereign governments don't want to regulate in my interests and protect me from surveillance capitalism, I'm simply going to take every route I can find to opt out of the whole enterprise. I already have started just turning off my phone for the majority of the day and opted out of all the major social networks. Hopefully a sufficient critical mass of people take this route such that it destroys enough economic value to push society in a better direction with meaningful trust and security guarantees, but in the meantime as long as the entire digital ecosystem is untrustworthy and actively antagonistic towards me, I'd rather just have nothing to do with it.
That isn't a question I can answer in a short post, but a couple quick hits:
1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives.
2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own internal issues, and in part because of fundamental supply and demand.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but I started in Philosophy and could have minored, but I finished my degree in History.
Quick thoughts:
1. I gave my siblings the advice after I was done to double major in something you love and something that will guarantee you employment. I graduated with not the most financially rewarding degrees, and while I ultimately taught myself programming and have made a pretty good career out of it, I wish I'd paired my humanities with compsci or business off the bat to make the whole job thing easier.
2. That said, I am very happy I studied those topics. They gave me a perspective that I don't think I would have gotten in a more nuts-and-bolts field. The name "humanities" is right on point: it's the study of what it means and what it's like to be a human being. And while I've been bitterly disappointed by the corruption of the field (which is the main reason I'm not a college professor now), I still think it's tremendously useful to have learned these things. David Foster Wallace's famous graduation speech has a line I particularly like, where he says something to the effect of "in the trenches of everyday life, it's little clichés that will kill you." All of this "obvious" wisdom that seems sort of hokey and unscientific often contains deep and terrible truths about life and what it means to be a person. And having a guidebook for that journey is a damned useful thing, and I feel bad for anyone who doesn't have one. This stuff won't solve all your problems, but it might help you with some of them. Chances are that of all the human beings who have ever lived, one of the great writers or thinkers or historical figures has dealt with something akin to what you will. We aren't all that different from one another. You can get some pretty good ideas out there for free. So I'm very grateful to have access to and a background in those things.
The emphasis on literature is definitely part of the problem. I was lucky enough to take an AP English Language class my senior year of high school, where the focus was on short essays and other nonfiction. That's what really ignited my love of reading. Before that I did enjoy my sci-fi novels, but I was much more of a TV/movies/video games person.
You counterexample would invalidate the idea that there is a direct causal mechanism between reading and pro-social behavior, but I don't think anyone is arguing that. Some anti-social behavior is a consequence of not being able to understand and to feel understood by other people. When you give people the tools to express themselves (and to understand others), it may make it easier for them to get what they want and need by talking instead of resorting to violence etc. The key here is that this obviously only works for SOME people. Not ALL crime can be explained by this idea, obviously.
This exact phenomenon is discussed in "Punished by Rewards." It's probably one of the best possible ways to train kids that reading is no fun, of no benefit to them, and should only be done if promised some kind of prize.
Yep. And those people need to be empowered and listened to enough to affect the hiring process. No great engineer I've ever met said "put them through 20 hours of leetcode, that'll do it." But here we are.
This is my sense. Most companies are just bad at hiring, so they hire a bunch of bad engineers and then go "there's a shortage of good engineers!" No, you're just bad at attracting and selecting a good distribution.
I think it has to do with people struggling to find meaning in the absence of inherited religion or any other guiding philosophy. The forces of capitalism and democracy have stripped away many communal traditions, but people still have a need for some kind of meaning, so it's not surprising they might turn to a philosophy that is highly individualistic and doesn't require an organized church.
Not sure if serious, but I disagree. I think scientists playing games with public perception is a big part of what undermined their credibility in the first place. Also this article talks about Ariely loudly promoting his own work after claiming he already should have known it failed to replicate. If scientific studies are being used to drive public discourse, then debunking them should be public discourse too. The very strength of science is its ability to be self-critical. The mechanics of that shouldn't be hidden away.
I think the general problem we're trying to correct for is the malfunction of the human mind in the presence of general purpose parallel computing as well as social technology. We're (largely) wired to attend to things sequentially, and we are highly susceptible to social signals. Our minds have parallel processing capabilities, but it's mostly the subconscious parts of our minds that work that way. With constant access to general-purpose computers, we try to start operating more and more in a consciously parallel mode, and this causes a significant amount of stress.
Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basic set of functions relevant to genomics, + a "we won't fuck up your data" feature.