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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#461

Post by mpol »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #428
celticmusic wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. This very much screams "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" to me.

It's a bit like saying everything can be modeled. What do economists, biologists, and traffic engineers increasingly use to do their work? Models. An awful lot of things are actually nail-like for this particular hammer. Applying it to relationships and society feels like a slippery slope. People are still people. But there's definitely cases where the analogy is useful, and maybe even spot-on.

I am almost through the book "Attached" by Amire Levine, on 'advise' from HN last week. It talks about the spectrum "fear/insecure - safe - avoiding" in relationships. It is very systematic in its approach and it opened my eyes to this way of looking. It is about the interactions between people on that spectrum inside a relationship.

I look at my past 2 relationships now quite differently. I am mostly safe attached, and tend a bit to avoiding as well. My first relationship was with a fear/insecure someone, which ended with a lot of drama. My second relationship, I wanted to avoid drama, and ended up with someone who was avoiding. That pushed me more in the direction of fear/insecure, but since I am more on the side of avoiding than fear/insecure, there wasn't enough glue to make it last. Now I am with someone who is mostly safe, but has some fear/insecure tendencies. We do manage quite well I think :)

I tend to look at it like this; people are individual and always unique. When you bring together 2 unique persons, you end up with a unique relationship. But there are still systems that you can discover there.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#462

Post by tombert »

Companies are not your friends, no matter how much they try and pretend they are. When your employer says "we're a family here" or something like that, that's simply untrue. I don't think that the people that say that are "lying" exactly, since "lying" implies intent, and I think most of the time when your manager tells you that they do think it's true.

If being a worker at a job were really "family", they wouldn't fire you off the second you start underperforming, or the second the economy tanks, or the second that they found someone cheaper to replace you; if someone's mother or father did that, you'd rightly think of them as a jerk.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#463

Post by mnsc »

solveit wrote: post #450
jpg_converter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> And why in the world would (...) people being systems to be optimized rule out treating people with respect, empathy, and kindness.

Because seeing people as systems to be optimized is per definition dehumanizing which is an action that is not respectful or empathetic?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#464

Post by JackFr »

tpxl wrote: post #318
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The degree to which everything runs on this sort of system is kind of horrifying, once you're exposed to enough things like this for that to sink in. So? It clearly works. People want everything to be high quality master craftsman type work but almost nothing is and it almost never matters. People like to think that the auditors are going over the papers with a magnifying glass and that their landscaper is applying…

> It clearly works. Clearly it doesn't and when it does, it's despite this, not because of it. The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented. Misinformation about WMDs led to useless wars. The war on drugs is a huge waste of resources because why? Ticking checkboxes is a big cause of our problems.

> The economic crisis of 2008/9 could have easily been prevented.

That's not clear at all. There are systemic changes one might have made that could have reduced the impact at the margins, but ultimately the cause was too much much money chasing too few assets and I have yet to see any plan that would have changed that.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#465

Post by adriantam »

neilkakkar wrote: post #258
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

> "You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can." Why do you think so? Given Google Maps has real time information about cars on both routes, I'd think it does a better job of aggregating this data than my intuition.

Give you an example: A highway in my neighborhood is congested often but if you can put 3 people in your car, you are eligible to use the HOV lane and usually you can watch the cars next to you moving slowly while you can go in 50mph. Google won't know you are eligible for HOV lane and assume you are not.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#466

Post by tatar »

timerol wrote: post #454
tatar wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…

Moore's law is a specific example of a manufacturing learning curve, which can be described here: http://www.strategosinc.com/articles/strategy/learning_curve... . This is generally what people mean when they talk about "economies of scale": The more of a thing you make, the faster and cheaper you can make it. Moore's law (indirectly) names the constants on this curve for a integrated electronics, which is a field wh…

This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

Just looking at learning curves per industry, do you think its possible to make educated guesses as to which would stand to benefit more from improvement?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#467

Post by dcarmo »

Pigo wrote: post #386
Waterluvian wrote: post #137

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

So much this. Our time on this Earth is so short. I used to love video games, but now I'm trying to make up for the time I wasted playing Everquest. There's so many experiences out there waiting to be had.

Why do you consider the time playing Everquest wasted? It was what you wanted to do, you did it and had fun. Now you want to do something else and that's fine.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#468

Post by [deleted] »

celticmusic wrote: post #425
nkrisc wrote: post #327

How important it is to be able to inhabit another person's viewpoint and see things from their perspective. So much time and effort is saved in doing so. Much of my job has become translating and mediating between stakeholders going around in circles, because each one believes their viewpoint represents the entirety of the issue. They can not understand one another because they assume the other understands everything…

this post is a bit of an oxymoron to me. You say you're great at seeing other perspectives, but then you dehumanize them by calling them stakeholders (a term that is the new "resource"). They're people. Call them people.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#469

Post by teucris »

solveit wrote: post #450
jpg_converter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

> I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think.

I honestly can’t deduce from your comment what the misunderstanding is. Is it that certain people see optimizing systems as an empathetic action?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#470

Post by selimthegrim »

barry-cotter wrote: post #391
muzani wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear it doesn't work perfectly - depression rates in capitalist countries are very high, salaries are still a problem, even when GDP improves. The Communist revolution took off all over the world, but later everyone learned that communism isn't better. All change takes time and energy. I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it. We've put a lot of our energy into things like el…

> All change takes time and energy. I think we're still missing a great economic thinker who can try to solve it. We’ve known that the economy is an intractable problem for a lot longer than I’ve been alive. Capitalism approximates an efficient solution. There’s a large economics and computer science literature on this if you’re interested, or for a fictional treatment you could read Red Plenty , Francis Spufford, wh…

Spufford’s treatment of genetics is so shockingly mathematically ignorant in that book (whether Raissa Berg had anything to do with his depiction of her crusade or not) that that book was on thin ice with me even before Cosma Shalizi’s review
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