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Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

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Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#81

Post by _DeadFred_ »

felixgallo wrote: post #49
malthaus wrote: post #14

nothing grinds my gears more than "management wisdom" like this and people who then attribute success to small details like that. amazon could have thrived the same way had they used powerpoint, maybe even more. we will never know. also, different people communicate differently. dictating 6-pagers makes you select for people who prefer that, therefore having less diversity in thinking.

You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus…

Didn't early Amazon use doors for desks? Forget ergonomics, forget making sure tools are fit for purpose. Seems contradictory.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#82

Post by brador »

Amazon were making so much money that all non executive employees could not make a mistake that could not be trivially corrected.

Every meeting decision point was either correct or a rounding error cost and quick firing for incompetence.

It’s why ex-Amazon is the 2x resume line to look for even now.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#83

Post by slowmovintarget »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #81
felixgallo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the fundamental point. Early Amazon succeeded because it created an evangelical corporate culture of (my words) not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting to infect its communications and processes. The Leadership Principles were set up as an intentional immune system to stave off what we now call enshittification. The rigid document and meeting structures were set up to focus…

Didn't early Amazon use doors for desks? Forget ergonomics, forget making sure tools are fit for purpose. Seems contradictory.

Deliberately avoiding a tool that typically results in superficial communications seems on point to me.

I don't think your reductio ad absurdum works here.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#84

Post by slowmovintarget »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #68
flappyeagle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right

prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas. Relatively clever people will also converge on a n…

For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong.

Wrongness even has more categories:

- Fails to address premise

- Contradicts premise

- Fails to match goals

- Cannot be understood

- Makes claims not in evidence

- Based on claims not in evidence

- Is deliberately false

- Assumes impossible outcomes

- Assumes impossible preconditions

- Is untimely

- ...

"What should we do to pass the time?"

"We could go hang ourselves..."

You list three categories of being "right" for an answer, but each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution). Each of these categories has fewer possible formulations than the categories for being wrong.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#85

Post by _DeadFred_ »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #83
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't early Amazon use doors for desks? Forget ergonomics, forget making sure tools are fit for purpose. Seems contradictory.

Deliberately avoiding a tool that typically results in superficial communications seems on point to me. I don't think your reductio ad absurdum works here.

"not permitting inane bullshit, falsity, dress-up, and cargo culting"

Except for the performative austerity of executives building desks out of doors. That’s theater, not clarity.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#86

Post by bediger4000 »

grues-dinner wrote: post #77
bediger4000 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can just recycle the same slides forever, This has been true since overhead projectors were invented.

True, but OHP lessons are somehow still a lot more interactive than clicking through bullet points one at a time (not that all PowerPoint lessons are like that, but lots are). Maybe it's simply the physical act of changing the sheet, but my memory of the lessons was that they played a much smaller part in the lesson than a PowerPoint usually does in a PowerPoint lesson (and later lecture).

My sister, 5 years younger than me, got high school geometry with a set of overheads that were used by a different, older, teacher when I was a sophomore.

My memory of those lessons was that Mrs White only did things on the overhead slides, with wax pencils. A PowerPoint would have been lively compared to euclidean geometry on overhead slides.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#88

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Kinrany wrote: post #72
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you show that intelligent people think alike?

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Not evidence but a good reference to this expectation.

I'm not sure which you are equating happiness with here, is it intelligence or stupidity? At any rate many folk sayings around the world claim that only the stupid are truly happy.

Re: Jeff Bezos doesn't believe in PowerPoint, and his employees agree

#90

Post by bryanrasmussen »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #84
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas. Relatively clever people will also converge on a n…

For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong. Wrongness even has more categories: - Fails to address premise - Contradicts premise - Fails to match goals - Cannot be un…

>For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion.

Q: should one vote for Trump A: No, because it will distract from his duties to distribute toys to good children once a year.

Is that a wrong answer or a right answer, assuming that one agrees on should not vote for Trump.

At any rate let us put it in the set of wrong answers, is it a wrong answer that will ever actually be given in seriousness to the question? Sure it is a potentially wrong answer to the question, as is "2 + 2 equals 5" but while potentially wrong is it ever going to be wrong in actuality.

The set of potential wrong answers to any question is infinite, the set of actual answers probably are not infinite, and as I noted from my experience seems to actually converge on a normative set of wrong / stupid answers.

> each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution).

given your use of potential answers that are wrong to show how that set is much bigger I would think you would see that the innovative is probably bigger than immediate (depending on constraints of problem) and also unknowable.

>"What should we do to pass the time?" shows a question

>"We could go hang ourselves..." shows not a serious attempt to answer the question, in my experience, but a refusal to consider the question important enough to answer.

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