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Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

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Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#71

Post by mellavora »

alvincodes wrote: post #33
stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

I'm at the point now that I'll immediately stop reading whenever I see obscure expressions in latin or French.

Good think you left greek off the list, otherwise you'd never get anywhere in statistical reasoning.

ceteris paribus, technical terms are obscure to people outside the field. Using them well is a nice way to bring people into the field, and to signal that you mean the term in a very specific context.

And that paragraph is one of the worst uses of "ceteris paribus" I've seen. For one, I'm not even talking about economics. And only tangentially about holding some variables constant while changing others.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#72

Post by mellavora »

trhoad wrote: post #66

I must be stupid because I understood very little of this. The cynic in me says it sounds a lot like pseudo-intellectual-babble, but maybe I'm wrong. I can pick out so many parts that seem to be an extremely odd take on things, but this one stood out: > the total time spent communicating will grow quadratically as the work capacity of the organization grows linearly. The assumption being that everybody needs to speak…

It is actually a fundamental insight. The same principle explains why the cortex has developed functional areas, and the advantages of mylenation.

It also underlies Dunbar's rule on group sizes and how organizations scale.

The point is exactly as you say, everyone does NOT need to speak to everyone else-- but you then have to structure the communication channels. This is a different challenge in a 15 person org than a 3 person org. Let alone a 150 person org.

If you've ever been on a team which went from 5 to 8 people, you've seen this play out. God help you if the team crosses 15 people and you don't realize this triggers a phase shift.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#73

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

caust1c wrote: post #64
d0liver wrote: post #47

Humans are probably a lot more like plants than distributed computing systems. Everyone likes a different environment. We bear different kinds of fruit. You can't just uproot a person randomly and move them around and expect everything to be the same. We put roots out into every available nook and cranny, bending around each other to get what we need. Throwing a new person into the mix changes everything. Reasoning a…

I think you miss the point of the article a bit. I believe what he's getting at is this: there tends to arise bottlenecks in any growing organizations which prohibit them from moving as fast as every individual operating at full capacity, whatever that individual's capacity may be. Intuitively, in smaller organizations these bottlenecks are fewer, and in an organization of 1, your individual capacity is only limited…

Every place were money is involved longterm becomes a ecosystem, with prey, preyed-upon, parasites and a balancing ecology, reducing the possible effectiveness.

A companys maximal performance is limited by this internal eco-system and its external eco-system. There can be short term gains as the system spins itself appart, but there is a peak antelop even for the most well adapted lion.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#74

Post by mellavora »

robotresearcher wrote: post #21

This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible. This may be nearly true in a large org on average but may be far from true in a small org. To see this, consider that adding a sales person to a group of engineers, or vice versa, could have a nonlinear improvement in revenue. It’s an awful buzzword to be sure, but superlinear gains from functional diversity is called synergy and it’s possible.

superlinear is not a buzzword, it is a technical term refering to how systems scale. Sante Fe institute publishes a lot on this, see i.e. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610172104

which discusses sublinear and superlinear scaling of complex networks.

The first law, “sublinear scaling,” is for systems that deliver resources. It means a city with a large population needs only ~80% as many roads, power lines, and gas stations per person as a city half its size. The second, “SUPERLINEAR scaling,” applies to outputs of socioeconomic activity. It means a large city produces ~120% more wealth, patents, crime, pollution, and disease per person than a city half its size.

“Remarkably, these two growth rates, 0.8 and 1.2., are showing up over and over again in literally dozens of city-related contexts and applications,” wrote Complexity Science Hub Vienna in a press release. “However, so far it is not really understood where these numbers come from.”

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/researchers-reveal-...

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#75

Post by Dave3of5 »

stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Reads like a lot of Uni material.

We actually had a course at our Uni to stop us writing in this style. The Professors had become sick of reading white papers that said something straight forward in this strange Academic language.

I'd be willing to bet this person is very well educated or has maybe has worked in Academia.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#76

Post by stavros »

swatcoder wrote: post #30
stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Or it’s just a style that they write in, plainly inspired by the stuff they like to read. We can have a discussion about whether it’s good delivery of that style, or whether the style itself is accessible, but I’m not sure what we gain by trying to analyze someone’s personality through it.

I didn't mean it as an analysis of his personality (how can you do that from a blog post?), it's just shorthand for "I dislike this writing style in this specific way".

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#77

Post by actionfromafar »

stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Okay, playing the devils advocate here, but sometimes the "lingo" is useful.

Grabbing a "couple of beers" could really mean a "bunch of beers". But a "dyad of beers" is very explicitly exactly two beers.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#78

Post by stavros »

actionfromafar wrote: post #77
stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Okay, playing the devils advocate here, but sometimes the "lingo" is useful. Grabbing a "couple of beers" could really mean a "bunch of beers". But a "dyad of beers" is very explicitly exactly two beers.

But so does "two beers", and it doesn't require you to know a random Greek word.

I mean, it doesn't necessitate you to ken an aleatorial Hellenic lexis.

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#79

Post by ciphol »

actionfromafar wrote: post #77
stavros wrote: post #24

Regardless of the content, it strikes me that this author is a bit stuck in his own head? He uses rare words when common ones will do ("dyad"? What's wrong with "pair"?), passingly mentions obscure terms for no reason, and in general writes like the less the reader understands, the smarter the material was.

Okay, playing the devils advocate here, but sometimes the "lingo" is useful. Grabbing a "couple of beers" could really mean a "bunch of beers". But a "dyad of beers" is very explicitly exactly two beers.

So is a "pair of beers".

Re: Work is work, in which returns diminish (2020)

#80

Post by danieljacksonno »

mellavora wrote: post #74
robotresearcher wrote: post #21

This analysis assumes that a unit of work is fungible. This may be nearly true in a large org on average but may be far from true in a small org. To see this, consider that adding a sales person to a group of engineers, or vice versa, could have a nonlinear improvement in revenue. It’s an awful buzzword to be sure, but superlinear gains from functional diversity is called synergy and it’s possible.

superlinear is not a buzzword, it is a technical term refering to how systems scale. Sante Fe institute publishes a lot on this, see i.e. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610172104 which discusses sublinear and superlinear scaling of complex networks. The first law, “sublinear scaling,” is for systems that deliver resources. It means a city with a large population needs only ~80% as many roads, power lines,…

He means "synergy" is the buzz word, resulting in superlinear scaling.
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