planet-and-halo

6 ms·

1.
by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Yep, it's definitely not a U.S. only issue. I agree, it strikes me as basically a consequence of media.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Matt Taibbi (and others) compare it to Pro Wrestling. Which is actually kind of a cool thing, and gets dumped on way too unfairly in general as an art form. But as a model for politics, oh god, please, no. The guy with the nuclear launch co
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quote about it, something along the lines of the most
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I'd actually be curious to see an analysis of this. All of my experience suggests that there is indeed a significant difference in employee quality and a substantial cost imposed by turnover, but I'd love to see some data to the c
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
If you think about this from a game theoretic perspective, it makes business sense to "defect" first (make this offer to employees). If all firms could be trusted to cooperate, they could pressure workers to return and workers wou
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Sorry to be that guy, but it's funny to me Seneca identified this exact thing thousands of years ago. He said something like, we must not take on tasks which are not so much huge as generate a proliferation of smaller tasks.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I think the biggest place where it's really necessary is integration points. Within your system it's reasonable to try to define exceptions out of existence. Once you start accepting user input or depending upon some system outsid
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I did a quick search for the article "How to Ruin Motivation With Pay" but it's behind a paywall. The book "Punished By Rewards" has a lot of references if you're interested.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
The problem in doing that is you generate metric tons of resentment and politicking among people in the same role. If my title is the same as someone else's but I'm making 20% less than they are, even if I can bring myself to a
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I was using the word "animal" in the sense of "non-human." The point is that non-human intelligence is particularly difficult and complicated for us to discuss, because no member of our species has experienced it and so
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Intelligence, and animal intelligence in particular, is a very complicated topic. But I definitely suspect a nontrivial percentage of people who assume animals are dumb are doing it because of the mismatch in non-verbal cues. I for example
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Not OP, but I imagine it's something like "precision" vs. "how often correct." So you can be extremely precise quickly, but not all the time. Or you can be extremely precise all the time, but not in time to make goo
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Appreciate the recs. Thanks very much for taking the time to write a detailed response.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Any recommended reading? I've bought a few things in that vein but I'm self-taught and always looking to improve on the ops/perf side.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Fair point, but it's a useful shorthand for "assembles a vast profile via collection of your data in an effort to manipulate your behavior." Part of Zuboff's book is about this very thing. This is an entirely new economi
16.
by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free and great service (like Google Maps) at the exact same t
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I'd rather be flagged as someone who gives a shit about privacy and autonomy than passively accept the further degradation of those things. If we all treat this as a tragedy-of-the-commons situation and impotently accept whatever these
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
This is my approach. If sovereign governments don't want to regulate in my interests and protect me from surveillance capitalism, I'm simply going to take every route I can find to opt out of the whole enterprise. I already have s
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
That isn't a question I can answer in a short post, but a couple quick hits: 1. Education is a business now, and responds to business incentives. 2. The postgrad environment is a mess, in part because of #1, in part because of its own
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Not exactly what you're looking for, but I started in Philosophy and could have minored, but I finished my degree in History. Quick thoughts: 1. I gave my siblings the advice after I was done to double major in something you love and s
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
The emphasis on literature is definitely part of the problem. I was lucky enough to take an AP English Language class my senior year of high school, where the focus was on short essays and other nonfiction. That's what really ignited m
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Whenever people say that, I feel a little bad because I suspect their education failed them. But I also think of this Otto von Bismarck quote: "Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
You counterexample would invalidate the idea that there is a direct causal mechanism between reading and pro-social behavior, but I don't think anyone is arguing that. Some anti-social behavior is a consequence of not being able to und
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
This exact phenomenon is discussed in "Punished by Rewards." It's probably one of the best possible ways to train kids that reading is no fun, of no benefit to them, and should only be done if promised some kind of prize.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Yep. And those people need to be empowered and listened to enough to affect the hiring process. No great engineer I've ever met said "put them through 20 hours of leetcode, that'll do it." But here we are.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
This is my sense. Most companies are just bad at hiring, so they hire a bunch of bad engineers and then go "there's a shortage of good engineers!" No, you're just bad at attracting and selecting a good distribution.
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I think it has to do with people struggling to find meaning in the absence of inherited religion or any other guiding philosophy. The forces of capitalism and democracy have stripped away many communal traditions, but people still have a ne
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Not sure if serious, but I disagree. I think scientists playing games with public perception is a big part of what undermined their credibility in the first place. Also this article talks about Ariely loudly promoting his own work after cla
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
I think the general problem we're trying to correct for is the malfunction of the human mind in the presence of general purpose parallel computing as well as social technology. We're (largely) wired to attend to things sequentiall
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by planet-and-halo 5y ago
Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basi

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