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I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And

I think a way to sum this up is simply metric optimizing. As organizations and companies grow larger the need to evaluate people at scale becomes necessary. And so metrics are used, and people then naturally start to optimize around those metrics. But it seems to invariably turns out that any sort of metric you create will not effectively measure progress towards a goal you want to achieve, when that metric ends up being optimized for. The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild. I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Seattle3503 2y ago
I think there is something to the idea that there are roo many too large firms doing abstract work. People have become detached from their impact.
- a_bonobo 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation >Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]
  - skyyler 2y ago
    One of my favourite things about internet forums is watching people re-invent Marxist theory by being mad at the current state of things. It's been like this for a while now. I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.
    - silverquiet 2y ago
      My favorite was some comment on Reddit or other observing how often people had to resort to paying medical bills via GoFundMe. They had the idea to create one large pool of money in order to pay the medical bills of all citizens. It is often hard to tell trolling from genuine incompetence.
    - a_bonobo 2y ago
      While that may be classic Marxist stuff, modern philosophers like Byung-Chul Han give a great twist on the whole thing in a digital age, I should've linked to his works too, especially for the self-optimising HN crowd. Just quoting from Wikipedia: >Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      Marx doesn't make any real sense in modern times because of his obsession on class divides. In contemporary society there's no real difference between a capitalist and a worker. This is true even in his own terms since we all literally own one of the most valuable 'means of production' - a computer. Obviously I'm in no way saying that there aren't invisible classes in society, but that these don't define our possibilities in ways at all comparable to the early 19th century. People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.
puzzlingcaptcha 2y ago
Perhaps corporations should be organized like terrorist cells then.
whearyou 2y ago
Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization. That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs. Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power

Seattle3503 2y ago

I think there is something to the idea that there are roo many too large firms doing abstract work. People have become detached from their impact.

a_bonobo 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation >Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]
- skyyler 2y ago
  One of my favourite things about internet forums is watching people re-invent Marxist theory by being mad at the current state of things. It's been like this for a while now. I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.
  - silverquiet 2y ago
    My favorite was some comment on Reddit or other observing how often people had to resort to paying medical bills via GoFundMe. They had the idea to create one large pool of money in order to pay the medical bills of all citizens. It is often hard to tell trolling from genuine incompetence.
  - a_bonobo 2y ago
    While that may be classic Marxist stuff, modern philosophers like Byung-Chul Han give a great twist on the whole thing in a digital age, I should've linked to his works too, especially for the self-optimising HN crowd. Just quoting from Wikipedia: >Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Marx doesn't make any real sense in modern times because of his obsession on class divides. In contemporary society there's no real difference between a capitalist and a worker. This is true even in his own terms since we all literally own one of the most valuable 'means of production' - a computer. Obviously I'm in no way saying that there aren't invisible classes in society, but that these don't define our possibilities in ways at all comparable to the early 19th century. People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.

puzzlingcaptcha 2y ago

Perhaps corporations should be organized like terrorist cells then.

whearyou 2y ago

Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization. That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs. Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power