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Yeah the world is full of idiots in charge. If someone is "in charge" then they are most likely idiots. It's the statistical truth. Look at the world today? Who

Yeah the world is full of idiots in charge. If someone is "in charge" then they are most likely idiots. It's the statistical truth. Look at the world today? Who can claim thag over population and a melting planet is progress? The world is run by idiots. Did I stress that enough? :) The very idea of trying to control quality of anything complex (work, life, relationships, economy, etc) via some extremely shallow and arbitrary test is the most idiotic idea ever yet it is practiced on such a wide scale. The world is run by idiots.

daveguy 10y ago
> It's the statistical truth. I don't think claiming something is a statistical truth without showing the statistics will fly on HN.
- calibraxis 10y ago
  There's good arguments for their point. For instance: "When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what actually happened. ..." "True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolution-in-reverse https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolu...) However downvoted the parent post is, it's nevertheless one of the saner observations coming from a species destroying itself.
  - ilostmykeys 10y ago
    Love it. Thank you.
niftich 10y ago
This theory is called the Peter Principle [1], which posits that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
binarysolo 10y ago
So... be the change you wish to see? :) (Sure the world sucks, so there's constructive ways of tackling it and...) Personally, I've found that a lot of stupid things are there because of downside protection or effort-minimization aka laziness from the primary stakeholders...

daveguy 10y ago

> It's the statistical truth. I don't think claiming something is a statistical truth without showing the statistics will fly on HN.

calibraxis 10y ago
There's good arguments for their point. For instance: "When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what actually happened. ..." "True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolution-in-reverse https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolu...) However downvoted the parent post is, it's nevertheless one of the saner observations coming from a species destroying itself.
- ilostmykeys 10y ago
  Love it. Thank you.

niftich 10y ago

This theory is called the Peter Principle [1], which posits that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

binarysolo 10y ago

So... be the change you wish to see? :) (Sure the world sucks, so there's constructive ways of tackling it and...) Personally, I've found that a lot of stupid things are there because of downside protection or effort-minimization aka laziness from the primary stakeholders...