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Groups never admit failure
91–100 of 370 posts
Re: Groups never admit failure
#92I might suggest Naval misunderstands what it means to manage something (which is funny because he's known for being wildly successful at having done so). It's not solving problems, it's extracting value from them. The board he was on congratulated itself because it had managed, e.g. to continue to extract value from whatever cause or dynamic it ostensibly exists to contribute money into. It has no interest in solving problems, as then what would it exist to manage?
This is very close to the cynicism of those who accuse for-profit enterprise as only doing things for money with no care for the people their decisions effect, with the slight modification that it's not so much the money managerialists do it for as the power of continuing to do it, money is just one effect of sustaining a dynamic.
Imo, Naval's generalization succumbs to exceptions because it misses the above point of what these groups and boards are formed to do.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#93The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints. What's ironic is that it appears in a public environment in which groups are changing their viewpoints, often quite publicly. Many are taking extreme heat for this. Technical projects and groups are adopting codes of conduct and behaviour, changing stances on what had long been accepted. Companies are similarly changing their views on wha…
> The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier condemnations and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the conviction of Galileo.
But nobody changed their minds or admitted a mistake: people just died or retired and were replaced by different people who thought differently.
The content of the post makes it obvious that it's discussing the actions and decisions of groups over much shorter periods of time: i.e., within a single human lifetime, and actually within quite a small portion of a lifetime, because it's talking about outcomes of funded projects and how they're viewed.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#94there are a lot of funny passages in here, but this one really made me laugh: > If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable. You’re not out there with a begging bowl all the time. Tech, finance, and the automotive i…
It's interesting to me that you include the Tech industry. I am familiar with bailouts for the auto and financial industry. In what way is the Tech industry "insulated from feedback"?
Re: Groups never admit failure
#95Anecdotal at best. Never is too strong of a word here. I was expecting a study to be accompanied by the article given the conviction insinuated in the title.
Groups can come in various shapes and forms but generally they often come with a group leader, and that person can play a major role in defining success/failure.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation, industry, and energy in general. Your argument is not with profit but with human nature, which in its infinite ambition always desires more. Removing the profit motive is like shooting the messenger, your fundamental issue remains unaddress…
> Your argument is not with profit but with human nature As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?
This seems to be rather late?
Long distance trade and traveling merchants date back into the Bronze Age at least, and salt was probably traded in Europe during the Stone Age.
These transactions did not use money, but their basics do not differ much from contemporary trade - including the fact that trade centers and highly connected individuals could become very, very rich, almost unfathomably so when compared to their contemporaries.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it inconsistent to demand comments refrain from ideological claims where a posted article's raison d'etre is unsupported ideological argument?
I didn't demand that. This is about comment/thread quality. There are certain kinds of post that reliably lead to much lower-quality discussion, and those are the kinds we ask people to refrain from; generic ideological tangents (and generic tangents in general) are a case of this.
Ideology isn't the tangent here, dang, it's the core.
Visit the blog if you're unclear on that.
The problem, dear Brutus^Wdang, lies not in the comments, but the post.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#98This article reads like an anecdotal rant. > Groups never admit failure. > I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” First statement does not follow from the second. The rest of the article is even worse in its sudden jumps to conclusions.
The author is Naval Ravikant who is a wealthy VC and pseudo-philosopher. He's clearly a smart guy but also seemingly disconnected from reality at this point in his career.
A piece that has no facts backing the point, which exploits confirmation and conformity biases in readers, is just a badly researched and biased piece, regardless of author.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#99The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints. What's ironic is that it appears in a public environment in which groups are changing their viewpoints, often quite publicly. Many are taking extreme heat for this. Technical projects and groups are adopting codes of conduct and behaviour, changing stances on what had long been accepted. Companies are similarly changing their views on wha…
> The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints.
Actually the principal claim is that "a group will never admit they were wrong." I think I agree with both claims.
Re: Groups never admit failure
#100I can’t agree more with this post. This brings to mind some Milton Friedman quotes: * Governments never learn. Only people learn. * One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. * He moves fastest who moves alone. * Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own… *…
>* Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own…
That is definitely not true for me. I actually feel responsibility if it's not my money, while I can let myself off the hook for any personal indiscretion far too easily.