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At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people make all the time: 1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation. 2) Nobody on

At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people make all the time: 1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation. 2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation. 3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions. This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."

parrellel 6y ago
Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.
CptFribble 6y ago
I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with the way our brains process information - at a physical and organizational level, the human brain is like a series of stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks is extraneous) information down to a size that can be interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and how much information constitutes stress is different for everyone, itself produced by a learning process. Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains. The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).
- webmaven 6y ago
  > The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person). IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group. This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both. The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.
bentcorner 6y ago
While I think on one hand you're right, on the other hand I don't think it's really an error, because to end users the company is a monolithic entity, and the complex circumstances that led to something breaking for a particular user aren't important because at the end of the day their thing is broken.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright > For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts? They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable. By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned. Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.
  - alblue 6y ago
    Absolutely. Plus, and organisation can do dumb things because a single wrong person in the hierarchy of such a system can make a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo. The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.
    - KajMagnus 6y ago
      > wrong person [...] a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that > small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes? And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )
frosted-flakes 6y ago
I like how UK English uses plurals when referring to organizations. Rather than "Google is bad", it's "Google are bad", in recognition of the fact that Google is made up of lots of people.
- alblue 6y ago
  That’s because it’s a single organisation. Just because it is made up of tens of thousands of individuals doesn’t stop it being a single entity. You (and all other humans) are made up of thousands of bacteria and other specialised cells, but we don’t treat you as plural, although you are also a single entity consisting of tens of thousands of components.
noobermin 6y ago
It's nice for people to realize how bias helps shape this perspective but it doesn't change the fact that things are broken.

parrellel 6y ago

Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.

CptFribble 6y ago

I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with the way our brains process information - at a physical and organizational level, the human brain is like a series of stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks is extraneous) information down to a size that can be interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and how much information constitutes stress is different for everyone, itself produced by a learning process. Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains. The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).

webmaven 6y ago
> The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person). IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group. This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both. The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.

bentcorner 6y ago

While I think on one hand you're right, on the other hand I don't think it's really an error, because to end users the company is a monolithic entity, and the complex circumstances that led to something breaking for a particular user aren't important because at the end of the day their thing is broken.

KajMagnus 6y ago
So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
- webmaven 6y ago
  > So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all people working there are bright > For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts? They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable. By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned. Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.
- alblue 6y ago
  Absolutely. Plus, and organisation can do dumb things because a single wrong person in the hierarchy of such a system can make a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo. The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.
  - KajMagnus 6y ago
    > wrong person [...] a bad decision that takes hundreds of man years to undo Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that > small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes? And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )

frosted-flakes 6y ago

I like how UK English uses plurals when referring to organizations. Rather than "Google is bad", it's "Google are bad", in recognition of the fact that Google is made up of lots of people.

alblue 6y ago
That’s because it’s a single organisation. Just because it is made up of tens of thousands of individuals doesn’t stop it being a single entity. You (and all other humans) are made up of thousands of bacteria and other specialised cells, but we don’t treat you as plural, although you are also a single entity consisting of tens of thousands of components.

noobermin 6y ago

It's nice for people to realize how bias helps shape this perspective but it doesn't change the fact that things are broken.