8 ms·

The Era of the Business Idiot

120 points by dvt 1y ago

reverendsteveii 1y ago
I didn't sign up for the newsletter because OP listens to El-P, but that would have been enough on its own. I signed up for the Milton Friedman hate.
- therobot24 1y ago
  optimizing business value in the manner perpetuated by Friedman assumes you know more than you do and can adapt to things because of that knowledge, ultimately no one can actually do this because the world is chaotic and difficult to anything and everything that tries to master that chaos
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    On the contrary. Friedman argued that if as an executive you try to steer a business towards your particular personal aims that you are presuming to know more than you do about what is best for your shareholders who actually own the company. He is arguing that political whim is not a way to allocate the scarce resources of a company/society. In particular the article linked in this blog post is Friedman arguing against Nixon's price controls and Nixon's insistence that it was "socially responsible" to not raise prices as you own costs went up. Stripping the article of this consequence is either dishonest, or stupid.
    - therobot24 1y ago
      So my interpretation of how Friedman drew his theories of market (and granted I'm no expert, just a layman reading things online) are about every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I think you and i are aligned in this belief. Where i think we're separated, likely cause i just didn't explain it very well, was that to me, this means you as a CEO are accepting exploitation under the guise that you have the ability to react to the market forces to correct for it. That you 'know the market' and can adapt as needed. Such as described in the Friedman quote within the article which expresses an extremely libertarian view of how companies should be able to hire and fire workers: > “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.” In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
      - ch4s3 1y ago
        > every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power. > In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
        therobot24 1y ago
        >> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' > I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context. Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
        ch4s3 1y ago
        Yeah, Friedman would clearly agree that you can't have perfect knowledge but he argues that bad business decisions are punished with losses and firms' owners will fire bad managers or they'll lose their investments. You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.
lenerdenator 1y ago
I like the cut of Zitron's jib, but have to disagree with this point here: > We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters. Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number. We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
- johnea 1y ago
  > We have redefined competence Thanks for that! I'll definitely use that one...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  >Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
- listenallyall 1y ago
  > measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. This seems specious, I mean, when? And how? The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced. I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.
neom 1y ago
We have to carefully select the yardstick by which progress and success are measured. If we don't, we inevitably drift towards meaningless, short-term, and ultimately destructive forms of growth instead of progress. Incentive failures are more nuanced than “Friedman = root of all evil.” Venture capital structure, indexing, and monetary policy also drive the short termism. It's part of why I'm skeptical the next wave of amazing technology companies will come out of America.
mikestew 1y ago
TFA is a lengthy slog, but it seemed to be mostly worth it. If nothing else, TFA ties together a lot of the business folk wisdom with its origins, repeatedly pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist, this other one used as the basis for RTO came from someone talking about factory workers, not office workers, etc.
- ddejohn 1y ago
  Ed writes a lot of good stuff, but yeah, they're usually a slog. His diatribes seem to be getting longer lately too.
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    This is the first thing I've read by him and it is full of errors and out of context quotes.
- dvt 1y ago
  > pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist Actually this is a pretty weak point. We have plenty of historical examples where a terrible person came up with a brilliant idea. So Friedman being racist or not (he was categorically not, Zitron is being unfair here) is kind of a non-issue. The philosophical problem is that favoring shareholder value above moral value or social value (or whatever you want to call it: the betterment of society; or Socrates' "flourishing" [εὐδαιμονία]) just doesn't seem to have any positive externalities. "Line go up," sure, but what does that actually do? "Line go up" teleology is trivially a dead end moral philosophy. In fact, if history is much of a teacher, any economic teleology seems to be pretty morally bankrupt—from concrete jungle capitalism to Bolshevik communism to bartering. I'm extrapolating, but here, I do agree with Ed.
  - lazide 1y ago
    If you were trying to plan for retirement; and had a specific number you were trying to hit, who are you going to give your money to? The person who is good at consistently making the value/number go up and to the right on your money; or the one that gives vague ‘social good’ reasons why they aren’t? Especially if the ‘social good’ stuff is often vague and non-concrete? The world is a much different place from when Socrates was around.
beloch 1y ago
It's an ironic choice to choose longform as the vehicle for this message. This is the one form of blog-post/journalism for which it is worth using a bot to generate an abstract, just to decide if you'll read it. I've been burned by a link-bait title and an author who veers off the promised road into a ditch or an entirely different alleyway one too many times.
triceratops 1y ago
[flagged]
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  > brilliant economist There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today. We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
  - turnsout 1y ago
    Exactly. Economists don't even have good theories for why something happened, let alone what might happen in the future. The entire field is vibe-based, which they try to cover up with a lot of crackpot math.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today. Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold? >We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners. I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
- zeroCalories 1y ago
  Maybe people would just stop shopping as much if everyone was forced to participate? Is the solution to force everyone to engage in mandatory diversity shopping? Or is that what taxes are for?
VOIPThrowaway 1y ago
Nitpick: Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits. Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits. The capital class finds it very icky when peasants are fairly treated. They typically punish ir by making like go down. You don't need to have red skin and horns to take great pleasure in making those less powerful suffer.
  - disqard 1y ago
    Indeed, witness the recent RTO drive across the industry for knowledge workers.
bambax 1y ago
> For example, in his book, Capitalism and Friedman, he argued... That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  Wooosh
patrickmay 1y ago
> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html). If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  Really, the format of your email is dictated by the business norms of communication that you operate in. If your norms dictate that your emails must, say, be written in an extremely overwrought and formal manner that massages egos, then LLMs to generate and summarize might be the technology that brings efficiency while upholding these norms. Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.
evanjrowley 1y ago
>Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing." Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
abetusk 1y ago
> You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them summarized ... At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary? > ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is. > Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI. Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method? > Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing." There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit. I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason. None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them. What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".
jahsome 1y ago
> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article. Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.
tim333 1y ago
Zitron is such a moaner. Just page after page on how everything is crap. >The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
- dttze 1y ago
  Oh wow, what an amazingly skilled businessman for getting money during the era of ZIRP. For a shitty file hosting service, nonetheless. How dare Ed besmirch him.
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    How many billions did you make during ZIRP?
    - dttze 1y ago
      None, you?
jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
> "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it. He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism. This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
floydnoel 1y ago
> Famed Chicago School economist (and dweller of Hell) Milton Friedman wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!
- janalsncm 1y ago
  It sounds like you are saying they were nice people in person despite their public personas. To me, one’s actions in the real world matter a lot more than being friendly at an interpersonal level. How that translates in the spiritual realm is another question. A lot of religious texts focus on interpersonal behavior, so maybe friendly people with disastrous public policies would be judged accordingly.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  If an awful person has children it is of poor taste to say they were awful?
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    Especially if one of the children's David Friedman. Yeesh.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  If you are good to your friends, that doesn't make you a good person. Being a good person requires being good to your enemies, your victims, your oppressees, your ideological opponents. Do you know how many actual murderers have people lining up to say "But they were so nice"?
jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
> What do you mean by "other tasks"? Why are these questions never asked? To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved. This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.
- janalsncm 1y ago
  I imagine that an interviewer who suddenly put out an “emperor has no clothes” interview could short the stock and do quite well. It would also be a public service.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
    Blatant market manipulation. Thanks for the public service, enjoy prison.
    - janalsncm 1y ago
      Market manipulation involves lying. An interview that simply exposes the truth isn’t market manipulation.
      - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
        Wrong, manipulation does not necessarily involve lying, except if you define "lying" to make that statement a tautology.
ninininino 1y ago
> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI. I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not. If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand. If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know". The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier. I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.
janalsncm 1y ago
As they say, it takes two to tango. For every business idiot charming investors with vapid promises, there is a swarm of investors either fooled by the charm or hoping to sell to a greater fool. If investors won’t punish companies for lying about e.g. self driving being “very easy” then why shouldn’t CEOs commit blatant fraud in between Twitter flame wars? (Law be damned!)
VT-Business 1y ago
[flagged]
cannabis_sam 1y ago
“Business Idiot” seems like a bit of a superfluous phrase, outside of criticizing that particularly dangerous group of people hell-bent on destroying humanity as a concept. But the article is woefully lacking in that regard.
atxtosh 1y ago
Nathan For You is business idiot for SMBs.

120 points by dvt 1y ago

I didn't sign up for the newsletter because OP listens to El-P, but that would have been enough on its own. I signed up for the Milton Friedman hate.

therobot24 1y ago
optimizing business value in the manner perpetuated by Friedman assumes you know more than you do and can adapt to things because of that knowledge, ultimately no one can actually do this because the world is chaotic and difficult to anything and everything that tries to master that chaos
- ch4s3 1y ago
  On the contrary. Friedman argued that if as an executive you try to steer a business towards your particular personal aims that you are presuming to know more than you do about what is best for your shareholders who actually own the company. He is arguing that political whim is not a way to allocate the scarce resources of a company/society. In particular the article linked in this blog post is Friedman arguing against Nixon's price controls and Nixon's insistence that it was "socially responsible" to not raise prices as you own costs went up. Stripping the article of this consequence is either dishonest, or stupid.
  - therobot24 1y ago
    So my interpretation of how Friedman drew his theories of market (and granted I'm no expert, just a layman reading things online) are about every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I think you and i are aligned in this belief. Where i think we're separated, likely cause i just didn't explain it very well, was that to me, this means you as a CEO are accepting exploitation under the guise that you have the ability to react to the market forces to correct for it. That you 'know the market' and can adapt as needed. Such as described in the Friedman quote within the article which expresses an extremely libertarian view of how companies should be able to hire and fire workers: > “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.” In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
    - ch4s3 1y ago
      > every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I don't thing that's a correct assessment. He talks a lot about the need to follow laws an cultural norms and the importance of society setting normative guardrails for behavior. Moreover he point our I believe correctly that a lot of the worst behavior of businesses stem from monopoly power. > In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.
      - therobot24 1y ago
        >> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' > I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context. Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
        ch4s3 1y ago
        Yeah, Friedman would clearly agree that you can't have perfect knowledge but he argues that bad business decisions are punished with losses and firms' owners will fire bad managers or they'll lose their investments. You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.

lenerdenator 1y ago

I like the cut of Zitron's jib, but have to disagree with this point here: > We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters. Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number. We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.

johnea 1y ago
> We have redefined competence Thanks for that! I'll definitely use that one...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
h2zizzle 1y ago
>Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
listenallyall 1y ago
> measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. This seems specious, I mean, when? And how? The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced. I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.

neom 1y ago

We have to carefully select the yardstick by which progress and success are measured. If we don't, we inevitably drift towards meaningless, short-term, and ultimately destructive forms of growth instead of progress. Incentive failures are more nuanced than “Friedman = root of all evil.” Venture capital structure, indexing, and monetary policy also drive the short termism. It's part of why I'm skeptical the next wave of amazing technology companies will come out of America.

mikestew 1y ago

TFA is a lengthy slog, but it seemed to be mostly worth it. If nothing else, TFA ties together a lot of the business folk wisdom with its origins, repeatedly pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist, this other one used as the basis for RTO came from someone talking about factory workers, not office workers, etc.

ddejohn 1y ago
Ed writes a lot of good stuff, but yeah, they're usually a slog. His diatribes seem to be getting longer lately too.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  This is the first thing I've read by him and it is full of errors and out of context quotes.
dvt 1y ago
> pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist Actually this is a pretty weak point. We have plenty of historical examples where a terrible person came up with a brilliant idea. So Friedman being racist or not (he was categorically not, Zitron is being unfair here) is kind of a non-issue. The philosophical problem is that favoring shareholder value above moral value or social value (or whatever you want to call it: the betterment of society; or Socrates' "flourishing" [εὐδαιμονία]) just doesn't seem to have any positive externalities. "Line go up," sure, but what does that actually do? "Line go up" teleology is trivially a dead end moral philosophy. In fact, if history is much of a teacher, any economic teleology seems to be pretty morally bankrupt—from concrete jungle capitalism to Bolshevik communism to bartering. I'm extrapolating, but here, I do agree with Ed.
- lazide 1y ago
  If you were trying to plan for retirement; and had a specific number you were trying to hit, who are you going to give your money to? The person who is good at consistently making the value/number go up and to the right on your money; or the one that gives vague ‘social good’ reasons why they aren’t? Especially if the ‘social good’ stuff is often vague and non-concrete? The world is a much different place from when Socrates was around.

beloch 1y ago

It's an ironic choice to choose longform as the vehicle for this message. This is the one form of blog-post/journalism for which it is worth using a bot to generate an abstract, just to decide if you'll read it. I've been burned by a link-bait title and an author who veers off the promised road into a ditch or an entirely different alleyway one too many times.

triceratops 1y ago

[flagged]

lenerdenator 1y ago
> brilliant economist There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today. We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.
- turnsout 1y ago
  Exactly. Economists don't even have good theories for why something happened, let alone what might happen in the future. The entire field is vibe-based, which they try to cover up with a lot of crackpot math.
- gruez 1y ago
  >There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today. Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold? >We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners. I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
zeroCalories 1y ago
Maybe people would just stop shopping as much if everyone was forced to participate? Is the solution to force everyone to engage in mandatory diversity shopping? Or is that what taxes are for?

VOIPThrowaway 1y ago

Nitpick: Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits. Same with good customer service, environmental regulation following, and other things.

surgical_fire 1y ago
> Maximizing shareholder values can include treating your workers well if you think happy workers are more productive and therefore help with profits. The capital class finds it very icky when peasants are fairly treated. They typically punish ir by making like go down. You don't need to have red skin and horns to take great pleasure in making those less powerful suffer.
- disqard 1y ago
  Indeed, witness the recent RTO drive across the industry for knowledge workers.

bambax 1y ago

> For example, in his book, Capitalism and Friedman, he argued... That's pretty funny, but the book is actually called "Capitalism and Freedom".

surgical_fire 1y ago
Wooosh

patrickmay 1y ago

> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. I strongly agree. This echoes the cartoon about using LLMs to write and then summarize emails (https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html). If someone doesn't care enough about my time to compose a well-written email, with a tl;dr at the top if necessary, then I see no reason to care about what they've generated.

jhanschoo 1y ago
Really, the format of your email is dictated by the business norms of communication that you operate in. If your norms dictate that your emails must, say, be written in an extremely overwrought and formal manner that massages egos, then LLMs to generate and summarize might be the technology that brings efficiency while upholding these norms. Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.

evanjrowley 1y ago

>Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing." Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?

abetusk 1y ago

> You can read your messages on Outlook and Teams without having them summarized ... At the cost of 10x in time cost? The argument is against the notion of summary? > ... — and I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. And yet the world's population probably creates loads of important yet not well-written emails. Different contexts will also require different information to be extracted, so no matter how well-written an email is, the context might determine what the relevant information is. > Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI. Really? Are written articles not meant to be "spoken aloud"? Are plays not meant to be "turned into a movie"? Who cares cares if someone can get information about media that they want to consume with a new method? > Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing." There was no statement about requiring AI. It was about leveraging AI as a benefit. I use email instead of snail mail. I often watch technical talk videos at 2x speed to shoot past the filler. I read books in digital format instead of their physical counterparts because of convenience and access. I read online newspaper articles, rather than holding a physical newspaper, for the same reason. None of these require technology, they're enhanced by them. What a piece of shit article. I stopped reading after the first paragraph. This should read "The Era of the Technical Moron".

jahsome 1y ago

> I’d argue that a well-written email is one that doesn’t require a summary. I don't even know what this article is about but I'm so irritated by the insinuation people write and receive well-written emails I am too irritated to finish the article. Communication is (beyond frustratingly) not a highly valued skill in most of corporate America.

tim333 1y ago

Zitron is such a moaner. Just page after page on how everything is crap. >The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.

dttze 1y ago
Oh wow, what an amazingly skilled businessman for getting money during the era of ZIRP. For a shitty file hosting service, nonetheless. How dare Ed besmirch him.
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  How many billions did you make during ZIRP?
  - dttze 1y ago
    None, you?

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

> "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it. He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism. This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.

floydnoel 1y ago

> Famed Chicago School economist (and dweller of Hell) Milton Friedman wow. i've met his son David and interacted a small amount with a couple of his grandchildren. this was in very poor taste. and i really hate some of the things he was responsible for!

janalsncm 1y ago
It sounds like you are saying they were nice people in person despite their public personas. To me, one’s actions in the real world matter a lot more than being friendly at an interpersonal level. How that translates in the spiritual realm is another question. A lot of religious texts focus on interpersonal behavior, so maybe friendly people with disastrous public policies would be judged accordingly.
surgical_fire 1y ago
If an awful person has children it is of poor taste to say they were awful?
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  Especially if one of the children's David Friedman. Yeesh.
mrguyorama 1y ago
If you are good to your friends, that doesn't make you a good person. Being a good person requires being good to your enemies, your victims, your oppressees, your ideological opponents. Do you know how many actual murderers have people lining up to say "But they were so nice"?

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

> What do you mean by "other tasks"? Why are these questions never asked? To anyone else who, like me, has noticed this, the answer is: these interviews happen so that the interviewee can put out the message they want, and so that the interviewer can charge advertisers. Asking questions that could derail the theatre is not in the interest of the people involved. This also creates an environment where the interviewers are self selected. Interviewers who derail the interviewee's exposition don't land important interviewees.

janalsncm 1y ago
I imagine that an interviewer who suddenly put out an “emperor has no clothes” interview could short the stock and do quite well. It would also be a public service.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
  Blatant market manipulation. Thanks for the public service, enjoy prison.
  - janalsncm 1y ago
    Market manipulation involves lying. An interview that simply exposes the truth isn’t market manipulation.
    - jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
      Wrong, manipulation does not necessarily involve lying, except if you define "lying" to make that statement a tautology.

ninininino 1y ago

> Podcasts are not there "to be chatted about" with an AI. I stopped reading here. The author seems to fail to understand the new conceptual model that is interactive consumption. A conversation is a higher bandwidth form of communication and a two-way means of communication, it has features that a recorded piece of audio does not. If you get confused 10% of the way through a podcast, you can't have the podcast change and suddenly spend an extra two minutes explaining a concept it mentioned. But you can ask a conversational AI to explain something you didn't understand. If you find that the podcast is telling you something you already know, you need to skip around and figure out where it stops doing so and becomes useful again in a painful process. Within a conversation if you're the CEO of one of the world's most valuable corporations, you just cut the person off and say "I know". The author also fails to understand that people can personalize content by expressing preferences to an AI agent and having it interpolate the content to some new form, or style transfer it. Change its language into one's native tongue. Change the tone to suit one's current mood. Be more concise or funnier. I can only assume the author is letting their personal preferences for mediums of communication blind them to very real technological and communication advances happening.

janalsncm 1y ago

As they say, it takes two to tango. For every business idiot charming investors with vapid promises, there is a swarm of investors either fooled by the charm or hoping to sell to a greater fool. If investors won’t punish companies for lying about e.g. self driving being “very easy” then why shouldn’t CEOs commit blatant fraud in between Twitter flame wars? (Law be damned!)

VT-Business 1y ago

[flagged]

cannabis_sam 1y ago

“Business Idiot” seems like a bit of a superfluous phrase, outside of criticizing that particularly dangerous group of people hell-bent on destroying humanity as a concept. But the article is woefully lacking in that regard.

atxtosh 1y ago

Nathan For You is business idiot for SMBs.