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if you ever wake up and find yourself idolizing a sleazy cable company executive in the service of justifying some of your own aggressive and quasi-ethical beha

by a-dub 5y ago

if you ever wake up and find yourself idolizing a sleazy cable company executive in the service of justifying some of your own aggressive and quasi-ethical behaviors in business to yourself, then there's no point in playing anything anymore, you've already lost the most important game you will ever play.

pessimizer 5y ago
I think we need to stop blaming the failures of systems on lone psychopaths. There is a neverending supply of psychopaths. The problem is building and retaining systems that reward destructive behavior. "Admiration" might go too far, but there's got to be a word for admiring ability aside from its consequence. edit: I'm constantly annoyed by the way that we somehow blamed the Theranos debacle, something in which a thousand people were involved with and profited from, on one strange woman who was a teenager at its inception. There's an endless supply of strange teenagers. You can either destroy all of them as a prophylactic or figure out what's wrong with the system that enables one to assemble a multi-billion dollar fraud if you want to prevent the same from happening in the future. Or you can pretend that something is solved after you punish the teenager, and remain surrounded in fraud.
- a-dub 5y ago
  "don't hate the playa, hate the game"? nah. playing dirty is a form of cheating. how about "don't idolize or admire people who play dirty or aspire to and try to drag everything into the muck in order to justify or cover up their own dirty play"?
  - halfcreative 5y ago
    >playing dirty is a form of cheating. this is the scrub mentality that the article talks about
    - a-dub 5y ago
      cheaters only cheat because they know they're too mediocre to ever succeed legitimately. it's kinda like "i thought i was so bad at everything that the only way i thought i could succeed was to repackage nicotine with candy flavors and sell it to children"

by a-dub 5y ago

pessimizer 5y ago

I think we need to stop blaming the failures of systems on lone psychopaths. There is a neverending supply of psychopaths. The problem is building and retaining systems that reward destructive behavior. "Admiration" might go too far, but there's got to be a word for admiring ability aside from its consequence. edit: I'm constantly annoyed by the way that we somehow blamed the Theranos debacle, something in which a thousand people were involved with and profited from, on one strange woman who was a teenager at its inception. There's an endless supply of strange teenagers. You can either destroy all of them as a prophylactic or figure out what's wrong with the system that enables one to assemble a multi-billion dollar fraud if you want to prevent the same from happening in the future. Or you can pretend that something is solved after you punish the teenager, and remain surrounded in fraud.

a-dub 5y ago
"don't hate the playa, hate the game"? nah. playing dirty is a form of cheating. how about "don't idolize or admire people who play dirty or aspire to and try to drag everything into the muck in order to justify or cover up their own dirty play"?
- halfcreative 5y ago
  >playing dirty is a form of cheating. this is the scrub mentality that the article talks about
  - a-dub 5y ago
    cheaters only cheat because they know they're too mediocre to ever succeed legitimately. it's kinda like "i thought i was so bad at everything that the only way i thought i could succeed was to repackage nicotine with candy flavors and sell it to children"