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Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

evonomics.com

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Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#11

Post by mcphage »

seiji wrote: post #4
burnte wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that, while it's important not to put words in Bezos' mouth, altering that line in the article doesn't hurt the overall message, which is Bezos prefers harsh competition in the workplace, and that's counterproductive.

High performing people often prefer environments with high stakes and high risk/reward. Being harsh is awful for people who can't stand it, but empowering for those who thrive that way.

> but empowering for those who thrive that way.

The entire point of this article was that while it may be empowering for some individuals, the entire group output suffers, and as such is less effective than a system that empowers high performing groups instead. I mean, sure, it was taking a study and trying to overextend the result—but still, merely repeating that it's great for certain individuals misses the point entirely.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#12

Post by Hayekit »

dang wrote: post #10

Whether or not the title is false, it's certainly clickbait, so we changed it to a representative sentence from the article, in accordance with the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a great idea to regulate click-bait. I wonder if others find it to be click-bait though. The title represents the gist of the article. Click-bait would be a title far removed from the actual arguments or content in the article, IMO.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#13

Post by Hayekit »

dang wrote: post #10

Whether or not the title is false, it's certainly clickbait, so we changed it to a representative sentence from the article, in accordance with the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, isn't what you have now click-bait because it doesn't represent what the article is about?

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#14

Post by seiji »

aswanson wrote: post #8
seiji wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High performing people often prefer environments with high stakes and high risk/reward. Being harsh is awful for people who can't stand it, but empowering for those who thrive that way.

Enjoying harshness for it's own sake is masochistic stupidity. What's the upside for the amazon opportunity? As far as I can read from what's reported, below market compensation for the reward of watching your fucking back every microsecond and possibility of...? Where do I sign up to get books and trinkets delivered to your door a day faster? Beats the shit, mission wise, out of trying to cure cancer...

What's the upside for the amazon opportunity?

Jobs at public tech companies also come with large stock packages that become usable after just a few short years.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#15

Post by sgk284 »

seiji wrote: post #9
spamizbad wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High performing people often prefer environments with high stakes and high risk/reward. Is there any research to support that statement? Genuinely curious. Seems like it could be true, but also not.

Imagine a situation where your job is CRUD development. You write PHP and CSS and JavaScript for a series of ad campaigns (say, every marvel movie for the next 10 years). It's repetitive drone work. Then compare that to a situation where you have to send a rocket to space in the next 6 months or the company is out of business and you'll be homeless. Which situation motivates you to do better work?

Define "better work"? Sounds like that second situation will lead to some crappy architecture with bug-ridden code. The rocket will likely fail and explode.

Meanwhile in the first scenario you've got breathing room to build some truly beautiful code that will pay dividends as the upfront cost is amortized over a decade of reuse. We see similar results in academia, where incredible research can be done because there is predictability and reliability in the environment in which it is being performed.

High-stress rushed environments just lead to shitty work/life balance and, at best, mediocre solutions that will provide a stop-gap solution until there is time to do something better.

Look at the incredible output from engineers at Google, Facebook, etc... Most tech companies do their best work once they've removed stress and timeline pressure from the equation. The trick is to get to that as early as possible in the company's life.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#16

Post by HillRat »

seiji wrote: post #9
spamizbad wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High performing people often prefer environments with high stakes and high risk/reward. Is there any research to support that statement? Genuinely curious. Seems like it could be true, but also not.

Imagine a situation where your job is CRUD development. You write PHP and CSS and JavaScript for a series of ad campaigns (say, every marvel movie for the next 10 years). It's repetitive drone work. Then compare that to a situation where you have to send a rocket to space in the next 6 months or the company is out of business and you'll be homeless. Which situation motivates you to do better work?

Pretty sure the latter situation ends with homeless engineers and dead test pilots. Einstein developed his seminal theories working as a patent clerk; not sure you can argue without evidence that an insane, high-stress workload is conducive to anything other than burnout.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#17

Post by seiji »

HillRat wrote: post #16
seiji wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a situation where your job is CRUD development. You write PHP and CSS and JavaScript for a series of ad campaigns (say, every marvel movie for the next 10 years). It's repetitive drone work. Then compare that to a situation where you have to send a rocket to space in the next 6 months or the company is out of business and you'll be homeless. Which situation motivates you to do better work?

Pretty sure the latter situation ends with homeless engineers and dead test pilots. Einstein developed his seminal theories working as a patent clerk; not sure you can argue without evidence that an insane, high-stress workload is conducive to anything other than burnout.

You do realize this is the website for 80-hour-work-week, launch-startup-in-3-months fans, right? This isn't the place for nonsensical "work life balance" (which really means "i'm lazy and don't want to do good work, i just want to waste everybody else's time").

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#18

Post by seiji »

sgk284 wrote: post #15
seiji wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a situation where your job is CRUD development. You write PHP and CSS and JavaScript for a series of ad campaigns (say, every marvel movie for the next 10 years). It's repetitive drone work. Then compare that to a situation where you have to send a rocket to space in the next 6 months or the company is out of business and you'll be homeless. Which situation motivates you to do better work?

Define "better work"? Sounds like that second situation will lead to some crappy architecture with bug-ridden code. The rocket will likely fail and explode. Meanwhile in the first scenario you've got breathing room to build some truly beautiful code that will pay dividends as the upfront cost is amortized over a decade of reuse. We see similar results in academia, where incredible research can be done because there i…

It's about purpose.

Either you are basically a human robot doing spec work or you can drive your own creative output for goals larger than yourself.

People don't know what they are capable of until they are pushed beyond limits they thought they had. The future isn't made by cautious people, it's made by being better than anybody thought could be accomplished.

"Create advertising units for campaign 3,401 of 16,032" isn't something where "beautiful" or "meaningful" comes into play. It's just drone work.

get to that as early as possible in the company's life.

We don't model startups on how a 30,000 employee company works. Completely different beasts.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#19

Post by lambdapie »

Can someone qualified comment on whether group selection is taken seriously among biologists now? I haven't followed the debate much but Dawkins at least has argued that group selection acts too slowly compared to individual selection to be an important force in evolution.

In either case I don't think it has much bearing on Amazon. In both cases evolution is just a metaphor/scienciness.

Re: Darwin regarded sympathy as the most important human adaptation

#20

Post by dang »

Hayekit wrote: post #12
dang wrote: post #10

Whether or not the title is false, it's certainly clickbait, so we changed it to a representative sentence from the article, in accordance with the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a great idea to regulate click-bait. I wonder if others find it to be click-bait though. The title represents the gist of the article. Click-bait would be a title far removed from the actual arguments or content in the article, IMO.

It's clickbait because it uses a celebrity name to grab attention. The article contains zero factual content about Bezos.

"X got Y all wrong!" is also an intrinsically baity construct.

If you don't think the title we gave it is representative, we're always open to better ones.

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