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Groups never admit failure

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Re: Groups never admit failure

#181

Post by pphysch »

jameslk wrote: post #56

> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” Just because the author can't think of an example doesn't make it true. In fact groups of people, typically businesses, admit failure all the time. And i…

One of the best contemporary counterexamples, and incidentally one of the largest organizations in the world by official membership, is the Communist Party of China.

A lot of Mao Zedong's policies are viewed as mistakes by the Party, including the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Heck, Mao himself publicly admitted that the GLF was a mistake for which he takes responsibility.

Yet the CPC, as an organization of millions of individuals, didn't implode and remains as formidable as ever.

There are a lot of reasons for this, not least China having 5000 years experience with running civilization-scale groups.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#182

Post by jzymbaluk »

What is this publication? I can't find an author name or "about us" page on their official website or twitter bio anywhere. I gather this is a blog for the spearhead investment group which they link to on their site, but it is pretty sketchy that there is no information available about who the authors of these essays are.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#183

Post by dredmorbius »

jzymbaluk wrote: post #182

What is this publication? I can't find an author name or "about us" page on their official website or twitter bio anywhere. I gather this is a blog for the spearhead investment group which they link to on their site, but it is pretty sketchy that there is no information available about who the authors of these essays are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant

Re: Groups never admit failure

#184

Post by 77pt77 »

jseliger wrote: post #2

I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving out money for a cause, and I found it very disillusioning because what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they would declare victory. Every project was victorious. Every project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping. There were a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of…

> There were a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners—but nothing ever got done.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

"The Red Queen"

Re: Groups never admit failure

#185

Post by 1cvmask »

Animats wrote: post #3

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” Now that is a useful insight. It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacin…

The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/10/why-nothing-even-the-air...

Meanwhile corporates are groups and when they fail we call it creative destruction in Schumpeter's words or nowadays disruption.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#186

Post by rkk3 »

> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,”

Controversies over the status of historical figures serves as a complete refutation of this piece. Societies and groups values are constantly changing.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#187

Post by failuser »

starfallg wrote: post #118
Marazan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The astonishing thing was that the UK had just sustained a massive bombing campaign by Germany whixh had veeu obviously and singularly failed to break the civilain spirit and make the UK sue for peace. So, obviously, the UK airforce proposed that a massive bombing campaign would clearly break the German civilian spirit and force Germany to sue for peace.

The allied bombing of civilian targets in Germany officially never happened. They were 'military' or 'industrial' targets. It's commonly understood that they were retaliatory as opposed to strategic.

Really? Was Dresden a military target? Most major German cities were reduced to rubble.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#188

Post by ProjectArcturis »

Marazan wrote: post #108
bell-cot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to the "Gun Club" (and also in the U.S. in the WWII era) was the Bomber Mafia - convinced that lots of long-range heavy bombers could win any war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia They were profoundly resistant to reality (such as sustained "unsustainable" loss rates in un-escorted daytime bomber attacks on Germany), or even ideological compromises (such as long-range fighter escorts for those bombe…

The astonishing thing was that the UK had just sustained a massive bombing campaign by Germany whixh had veeu obviously and singularly failed to break the civilain spirit and make the UK sue for peace. So, obviously, the UK airforce proposed that a massive bombing campaign would clearly break the German civilian spirit and force Germany to sue for peace.

Well yes, but the Blitz was never all that effective. London was never burned like Dresden, let alone Hiroshima. In any case, the aim was absolute destruction of production, not civilian demoralization.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#189

Post by dang »

dredmorbius wrote: post #97
dang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't need a tedious flamewar about predictable ideological talking points, regardless of what's in an article.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#190

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Symmetry wrote: post #110
derbOac wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the essay is strongly written — never is a strong word — but it resonated with me because of a personal experience. In that experience part of the problem was that those who disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or because they were driven away, or something in between. So there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "…

In extreme cases you have evaporative heating of groups where after some major setback all the more moderate members leave and the remainder are on average more attached to the group and more fanatical. This is pretty common to see when religious cults have prophesies that fail to pan out.

Or they accomplish their goal and everyone who isn't an extremist says it's mission accomplished and starts caring about other things leaving only extremists to chart the group's direction. MADD is a good example.
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