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Successful companies go blind

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Re: Successful companies go blind

#81

Post by jurgenburgen »

edot wrote: post #41
inigyou wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations were the original AIs. They were slower, a bit less predictable, but they were superhuman intelligence disciplined to produce only the most bland depersonalised slop at all times.

Interesting take. I assume that, because corporations are a subset of “groups of people” that this applies to any group? The theory here being that, in the same way that LLMs produce the average of everything they’ve trained on, a group of people produces the average of every individual’s ideas and efforts (subject to things like some people having more power than others, etc.)? I don’t think this is always true, how…

If every member of a group is above average then the output would also be above average?

Re: Successful companies go blind

#82

Post by LtWorf »

elictronic wrote: post #12

Currently working at an older style defense company and this fits but I think momentum is a better reference. There are no financial incentives to risk on new process. Gatekeepers, siloing, bureaucracy, and risk aversion act to stop and slow. I have worked startups and early stage companies prior and used that experience to force developmental projects and gotten prototypes and patents through the resistance. My cowo…

Not like startups where every meme that the architect read on some blog must be used in production are better.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#83

Post by bsenftner »

hunterpayne wrote: post #76
bsenftner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essay is not a trivial projection, its an astute observation of people in systems that no longer have to work to maintain their status quo. All those wealthy people ruining Western Culture have it far too easy to understand what they are doing to the rest of all they set upon.

Yes, take a look at the idea of "luxury political beliefs" for depth into this idea.

That's not the same at all. Folding "luxury political beliefs" into this is politicizing the idea when that is not necessary. It's a slur.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#85

Post by locallost »

I disagree with the analogy, where the fish can develop eyes again and see, if placed in another environment because the genes are still there. I don't think that companies that went blind have genes anymore. It's debatable if they ever had them or if their success was based as much as being in the right place at the right time. If the times change, the successful way may no longer be successful. What is the dog and what is the tail? But more simply, in the end you need good people because in the end the work needs to be done well. In that case the genes might be physically gone because those people moved on to other companies.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#86

Post by ownagefool »

lumost wrote: post #78
kardianos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up. I understand it can suck: but what is lacking isn't your technical demonstration (unless it is truly ground breaking), but your demonstration to clean up your own mess…

When I was in a large org, it was a common failure that a manager would come in from a smaller firm - and assume that our design practices etc. were meaningless overhead. Inevitably they'd try to do a "rapid prototype" of a feature that had been tried a hundred times before and declared "too hard/unworkable/uninteresting." as they wouldn't talk to those who had done this before, or look at any past work... the invari…

So I'm on the other side of this usually.

Most places I land there's deference to the status quo and those that came before. People assume that efforts of that past were well considered and that good work was done.

But ultimately when pressed, there's generally no evidence of the above, and when there is evidence, one can generally demonstrate the flaws in the approach, so I press on anyway and it hasn't really bitten me yet.

Of course, in many of these projects there's now deference to decisions I've made. Some of those decisions were well made, with evidence and supporting work, to make them challengeable should the understanding changes. Some of them are gut checks because they didn't matter to me at the time.

Either way the take away is good, but often practices exist simply to frustrate.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#87

Post by rcxdude »

ronfriedhaber wrote: post #46
bengale wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company at a certain point moves from “make it work” to “don’t break it”. Both have good reasons to be honest but “don’t break it” has far more restrictions.

Perhaps what separates the good companies from the Great companies is that the latter always tries to make it works, doesn't rest on it's laurels, and takes any bet which is +ev.

I think the main trick is balancing the two. Companies that take any +ev bet, no matter how big, will tend to explode spectacularly eventually (SBF famously had this philosophy, for example).

Skunkworks is a decent example of how this can work: you set up a subset of your larger company to operate more like a startup. But importantly this isolation both limits the risk to the company as a whole as well as isolating the subset from the bureaucracy of the larger organization.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#89

Post by ronfriedhaber »

rcxdude wrote: post #87
ronfriedhaber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps what separates the good companies from the Great companies is that the latter always tries to make it works, doesn't rest on it's laurels, and takes any bet which is +ev.

I think the main trick is balancing the two. Companies that take any +ev bet, no matter how big, will tend to explode spectacularly eventually (SBF famously had this philosophy, for example). Skunkworks is a decent example of how this can work: you set up a subset of your larger company to operate more like a startup. But importantly this isolation both limits the risk to the company as a whole as well as isolating t…

I tend to agree. This is just the intersection of two age-old problems; Kelly Criterion (pareto-optimal sizing of bets) and Organizational Management.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#90

Post by browski »

Creative writing has gone from Shakespeare and Poe to corny simile; "life is like a belly button."

Worked for Forrest because the character was intended to be simple.

A cave isn't stable. It's an ever evolving biome of spores, molds, and fungus.

Seems like this can stated much more simply; as a company scales latency grows between nodes fostering information asymmetries. That growth in communication latency while paychecks still show up lead workers to believe stability exists, they down play lag effects, become less pro-active. Latency in productivity increases, company falls behind.

Signal attenuation is a physical constant as entropy erodes structure requiring more energy to maintain structure while employees put in less. Imo this is why our economy is fundamentally flawed. There's no rewriting physics no matter how much rhetoric relative to economics we conjure. Bizarre and outdated belief language is magic and we simply haven't found the right spell.

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