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Groups never admit failure

nav.al

341–350 of 370 posts

Re: Groups never admit failure

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father incites me to apologize often for saying true things that aren’t nice. There are two approaches, and I believe you are pointing something correct. If you apologize on any aspect , it is a well-known effect that you entirely revoke your legitimacy from the group. In the woke culture for example, the first who apologize has to also quit and lose its career entirely, it’s a recurring problem. The second approa…

"If you apologize on any aspect, it is a well-known effect that you entirely revoke your legitimacy from the group" Modern approach to civil conflict. Maybe there should be a focus-group that teaches employees to acknowledge ("to own", as they preach) their mistakes?

It's not about how they do it but about what are the consequences.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#343
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organizati…

Just yesterday I stumbled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace Doesnt sound like Mao was that hot on admitting failure.

How about we read his actual words, spoken to a gathering of Party officials?

> I have committed two crimes, one of which is calling for 10,700,000 tons of steel and the mass smelting of steel. If you agreed with this, you should share some of the blame. But since I was the inventor of burial puppets, I cannot pass on the blame: the main responsibility is mine.

Read the whole thing for a little treat at the end.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...

Re: Groups never admit failure

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes further than that. Charging into machine guns does work! It works fine. Offense won a little over 50% of the time, making it better than defense. The problem, as identified in the post, is that although your charge usually succeeds, you end up taking ground that your pre-charge offensive barrage has made impossible to hold. And then you lose that ground.

You take more losses and run out of manpower - its a finite resource

More losses than what? Again, offense was slightly favored over defense, which is the only relevant comparison if you're trying to evaluate the claim "charging into machine guns doesn't work".

Re: Groups never admit failure

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organizati…

The CCP under XiaoPing Deng creates indeed a schism. It no longer takes communism seriously. Its legitmacy comes from economic growth, rather than from whatever Mao cared.

It creates a schism among Western "leftists" -- which, surprise, are completely irrelevant to internal affairs of The People's Republic of China.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distillation may be a more appropriate analogy. The unwanted part evaporates away, leaving the more concentrated solution behind.

In distillation, the whole input liquid is evaporated by heating, then condensed by cooling and collected.

That depends on whether you want the more volatile or less volatile liquid at the end.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd you figure that? Academics have been wrong about this from the start, I'd say. Their models are a byword for joke pseudo-science. But I guess your reference to "false balance" means we can infer what your beliefs are here. Groups never admit failure and one way they don't admit it, is by finding clever sounding excuses to not listen to those who were right.

Well, the RKI models pretty much predicted the German Wave Four. Case rates, hospitalization and so on was predicted pretty well. They missed the timeline by roughly two weeks so, if memory serves well. Little matter, since they first modelled that in summer.

They predicted a huge wave even after a vaccination programme? Really? When exactly did they "predict" this wave - can you cite that? Or is this one of those cases where modellers "predicted" something that was already happening.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP meant that Israel doesn't officially recognize Hamas rule over Gaza (because Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it also doesn't recognize Israel). But Hamas de facto rules over Gaza, and as a result they have (slightly) moderated their behavior. It's true that Israel does not consider Gaza to be Israeli territory, nor does it want to annex Gaza. And it hasn't actually occupied Gaza since Ariel Shar…

Thanks, you wrote it in a very clear way. I think we should note though that the Egyptian blockade of Gaza seems far stricter than the Israeli one (which just seems to control that weapons and things that can easily be used to create weaponry or tunnels aren't brought in).

> things that can easily be used to create weaponry

Just to be clear, this means items like food, paper and any and all electronics.

Israel maintains a strict calorie limitation on Gaza, because Hamas turns any excess into rockets. Of course, this doesn't actually deter Hamas that much, because they care about shooting at Israel more than they care about the health of the population, and so a huge portion of the population of Gaza is chronically malnourished.

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