The second part begins with: “Second, limiting the accountability if often exactly the thing you want.” Maybe I should have elaborated on that, but example is often worth 1000 words...
Martin Sustrik
Karma: 2,940
Absolutely. In adversarial setting (XZ backdoor) there’s no point in relaxing accountability.
The Air Maroc case is interesting though because it’s exactly the case when one would expect blameless postmortems to work: The employer and the employee are aligned—neither of them wants the plane to crash and so the assumption of no ill intent should hold.
Reading the article from the point of view of a former SRE… it stinks.
There’s something going on there that wasn’t investigated. The accident in question is probably just one instance of it, but how did the culture in the airlines got to the point where excessive risk taking and the captain bullying the pilot became acceptable? Even if they fired the captain, the culture would persist and similar accidents would still happen. Something was swept under the carpet here and that may have been avoided if the investigation was careful not to assign blame.
What’s interesting about the whole thing is that it’s not a statistical model with a single less/more accountability slider. There’s actual insight into the mechanism, which in turn allows to think about the problem qualitatively, to consider different kinds of sinks, which of them should be preferred and under which circumstances etc.
It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?
That’s a nice shortcut to explain the distinction between “a process imposed upon yourself” vs. “a process handed to you from above”.
My feeling is that combining both would lead to each compromising the other. Markets are driven by greed. If you add tribalistic incentives, you distort the flow of financial information within the system and make the market work less efficiently. Same applies the other way round: If you add financial incentives to the Twitter’s bridging algorithm, you are likely to end up with lower quality community notes.
Yes, I am seeing that as well. Technical/philosophical stuff is fine, but the psychology in adult fiction is too complex for an 11-years old to enjoy.
Exactly. You can’t make the kid read something, but if he doesn’t know the book exists he’s not going to read it for sure.
Wow. Worm? That’s pretty dark. Also a million words or so. Does your kid enjoy it?
That brings back memories. We used to have an english Encyclopaedia as well. Similar story. I still recall how gloomy an impression it made on me. It felt like the world might be a weird, dark and dangerous place, at least compared to the rosy picture that the local communist propaganda was trying to paint.
Thanks! A lot of stuff to check here.
The context is: The kid reads encyclopaedia for fun, really interested in the history of technology, likes Randall Munroe books, but I was looking for fiction to provide a more complex and nuanced view of world, going beyond the bare technicalities.
Thanks! Asimov I am trying right now. I find the robot stories quite naive nowadays, but it seems that it may be just the right level of complexity not to overwhelm the kid and make him abandon the book on the one hand and yet keep him interested on the other. Foundation series I am going to try next. I recall reading it at 15, so maybe 11 is a bit early, but yes, its mechanistic view of society can make you interested in social sciences even if you are naturally a STEM type. Ender’s game—great! I forgot about that one. As for The Martian not sure, it feels a bit too complex, but maybe it’s worth a try.
HPMOR has quite a complex story, not sure I would have been able to follow/enjoy it at 11.
b> Many cities and some countries are doing great things, but the EU likes to slow everything down
If it was that simple, its a whole mess with both EU and member states implicated:
In 2008, the EU established a European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) with the aim of replicating the success of institutions like MIT. If you have not heard of it, it is not your fault. The effort went badly from the start, as EU countries couldn’t agree on where to put it. So, in true EU fashion, governments compromised by breaking it into pieces and spreading it across multiple cities. So much for agglomeration effects.
But, it seems to me that to a greater extent than in the US, the money isn’t being captured by European GDP, and in many cases the projects using such technology that enable further growth are happening outside European borders.
Case in point: Germany subsidizing early development of solar. But there is longer any production of solar panels in Germany.
The traditional European approach is to wait for someone or something to raze your city and then rebuild with newer stuff and a better plan.
I think I’ve even seen a study about areas bombed out during WWII performing better economically today.
Agreed. But the popular narrative is that all the EU bureaucrats want is to regulate and then regulate some more. The sentence in question is supposed to say that it is not necessarily so, in accord with what you are saying.
Sorry, this is an internal European discourse about the European economy slowing down compared to the US. The “eurocrat” wording is a bit tongue-in-cheek thing. The reality is more about the coordination problems associated with scaling down the regulation. Compare the news like this: “Macron Warns EU ‘Could Die’ Within 3 Years Due to Overregulation, Welfare Burden, Underinvestment” https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/macron-warns-eu-could-die-within-3-years-due-to-overregulation-social-welfare-burden-underinvestment-5734718?rs=SHRNCMMW
At your service!
Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let’s say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.
Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:
For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
Significant portion of referendums is solved by negotiation (see article) and does not reach the voter at all.
Even if the voter is not properly informed they can either not vote (with no quorum that has no impact on the result) or vote “no” (which means “keep the status quo”).
Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that’s how it’s going to be.
It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can’t really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.
Here’s an essay about Europeans not spending as much on charity as Americans. You are an European, but spending a lot in the US. Now, I wonder how much of that is caused just by US having more interesting options to invest in. https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/where-are-europes-yimbys