Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you “There are no office politics here”, then don’t take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it—and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
“X has been tried and faied” remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to “man was not meant to fly”; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
Let me rephrase, then: declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
Aha, much more understandable. Thank you.
In that case: what would you surmise from a hiring manager that said “there’s office politics everywhere, of course, but we try to take an active role in minimizing their impact, and part of you being a good fit here will depend on your ability to help us with that goal.”?
(I regretfully confess that my own reaction to that statement would depend on that hiring manager’s gender, and (if male) how tall he was and how deep his voice was).
Perhaps a good way to deal with the situation in that XKCD comic would be to try to pick a culture that seemed particularly effective and then copy all of its norms, attitudes, etc.? So you’d have something that was battle-tested, if you will.
Well, Valve’s profitability per employee is supposedly higher than Google or Apple’s, and their employee handbook detailing their unconventional corporate culture is available for viewing online. shrug
(For what it’s worth from what I can tell Mormons don’t even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, ‘Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus’s teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]’) and so it’s more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
Will, out of curiosity; do you enclose your comments in parentheses to give them the quality of a “whispered aside”, as if the camera had cut to a couple of conversants sitting in the back stalls? Because that’s what it does in my brain.
I give a 70% chance that Mormon doctrine holds that Jesus is accidental (in the sense of not existing in all possible worlds). He has a physical body, after all. For that matter, so does God.
Mormon theology is too weird for me to fully grok, though.
“so many advantages” is optimistic in my opinion; I actually think it’s an at least somewhat close call. There are also upsides to status differences, like better group coordination (as I mentioned earlier). If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing. Another thing: when you’re having a conversation, you’d probably prefer for the most knowledgeable/intelligent/rational people to talk more than those who are less knowledgeable/intelligent/rational, and status differences often seem to have the side effect of accomplishing this. (But you can also get a suits/geeks type thing where some people are smooth talkers and some people know lots of math.)
(These are just my thoughts, I’m sure there’s more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me.)
If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing.
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I’ve experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insanely amplified and tend towards a positive feedback loop (the Matthew Effect again). So often times, you don’t actually get a proper selection pressure that leads to the more intelligent/knowledgable/rational people acquiring more status; what you get is the people who know how to leverage their current status get more status. And once you have that, you’re “locked in” to an oligarchy for good or ill.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-) What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something.
b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong.
c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you “There are no office politics here”, then don’t take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it—and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
“X has been tried and faied” remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to “man was not meant to fly”; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
Let me rephrase, then: declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
See also.
Aha, much more understandable. Thank you.
In that case: what would you surmise from a hiring manager that said “there’s office politics everywhere, of course, but we try to take an active role in minimizing their impact, and part of you being a good fit here will depend on your ability to help us with that goal.”?
(I regretfully confess that my own reaction to that statement would depend on that hiring manager’s gender, and (if male) how tall he was and how deep his voice was).
Perhaps a good way to deal with the situation in that XKCD comic would be to try to pick a culture that seemed particularly effective and then copy all of its norms, attitudes, etc.? So you’d have something that was battle-tested, if you will.
...Mormons? I don’t wanna. Even though it would probably work.
Well, Valve’s profitability per employee is supposedly higher than Google or Apple’s, and their employee handbook detailing their unconventional corporate culture is available for viewing online. shrug
Eh, it seems worth investigating to me.
(For what it’s worth from what I can tell Mormons don’t even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, ‘Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus’s teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]’) and so it’s more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
Will, out of curiosity; do you enclose your comments in parentheses to give them the quality of a “whispered aside”, as if the camera had cut to a couple of conversants sitting in the back stalls? Because that’s what it does in my brain.
More or less, yeah. Vladimir Nesov has a similar but distinct habit.
Hmmm, I hadn’t thought of that before.
I give a 70% chance that Mormon doctrine holds that Jesus is accidental (in the sense of not existing in all possible worlds). He has a physical body, after all. For that matter, so does God.
Mormon theology is too weird for me to fully grok, though.
(Eat some sauce.)
“so many advantages” is optimistic in my opinion; I actually think it’s an at least somewhat close call. There are also upsides to status differences, like better group coordination (as I mentioned earlier). If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing. Another thing: when you’re having a conversation, you’d probably prefer for the most knowledgeable/intelligent/rational people to talk more than those who are less knowledgeable/intelligent/rational, and status differences often seem to have the side effect of accomplishing this. (But you can also get a suits/geeks type thing where some people are smooth talkers and some people know lots of math.)
(These are just my thoughts, I’m sure there’s more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me.)
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I’ve experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insanely amplified and tend towards a positive feedback loop (the Matthew Effect again). So often times, you don’t actually get a proper selection pressure that leads to the more intelligent/knowledgable/rational people acquiring more status; what you get is the people who know how to leverage their current status get more status. And once you have that, you’re “locked in” to an oligarchy for good or ill.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-)
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Well, there is the LW anti-kibitzer, which can be enabled via the Preferences page.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something. b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong. c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
Sometimes you need to do things like ban a troll...