4 ms·
My takeaway is that danluu is saying that, at the small scale, people understand how individuals contribute to teams. But at the large scale (like the HR depa
by bobm_kite9 5y ago
My takeaway is that danluu is saying that, at the small scale, people understand how individuals contribute to teams. But at the large scale (like the HR department) we don't.
At the small scale, we're able to apply systems thinking - a team can be viewed as a system composed of a set of interacting parts.
However at larger scales, systems thinking becomes unwieldy - the interactions increase quadratically. There, we fall back to the Law of Large Numbers [1].
"Fungibility" and the related failures arise as a result of this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
- noduerme 5y agoOddly, though, most critical moments in history have been shaped by (highly error-prone, but non-fungible) individuals, acting on their own.
- quickthrower2 5y agoGood Job we don’t all work for one company
- bobm_kite9 5y agoThe law of large number works well for some things (say, shoe sizes) and fails to work for others (e.g. income distributions, which follow a power-law). So it's not odd at all that it would fail to adequately account for people. It's just sad we don't have anything better. Can't we find something better?
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoPower laws apply to individual output as well: https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/