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Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
61–70 of 81 posts
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#62When I hear "Bias toward action", it reminds me of von Hammerstein's typology:
> I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage. [0]
So reframed, TFA argues that one must be "hardworking and clever" instead of "hardworking and stupid".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
My version was Chesterton's Facehugger. Something which, as soon as you discover it, you should immediately respond by trying to remove it, without asking questions about where it came from or what its purpose might be.
Do you have a real practical example of this? I have never encountered a real one that didn't turn out to be a fence in hindsight.
I have encountered many. For example if you find a password in plaintext in source control, you don't assume the person who put it there had a good reason, you assume they were deeply misguided.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes. The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see h…
This might be appropriate in some cases, but it's important to consider that you have a finite amount of social capital as a new leader. Once people get sick of poorly thought-out changes it can be hard to keep changing things and get buy-in, and talented employees (who almost always have someone asking to hire them) can be the first to leave. I'm a fan of Chesterton's Fence [1]. Put effort into understanding the org…
absolutely. You have to get hearts and minds, and honestly that's the biggest job as any kind of leadership. I think if you say to people "We have to make changes, these are not arbitrary, the company needs to do X soon, and the best way to understand that is to make some short term uncomfortable changes. I want your feedback" etc, if you build trust through connecting your actions to your words, people can accept that.
The other part of that is ensuring that it doesn't fall disproportionately on certain sections of the company, and that you provide compensatory benefits like, say, comp overtime, extra vacation, bonuses, whatever is possible.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes. The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see h…
> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are, While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO. The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are gett…
My internal metaphor for senior management is of a man sitting in a darkened room receiving slips of paper under the door with little messages on them.
That's why founder types have such a massive advantage. They've got a much better mental picture of what's beyond the door.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#66So… figure out what’s going on before changing things?
I must admit I’ve always considered this to be self-evident but maybe I’m the odd one out.
I’d be a terrible blogger.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#67This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…
I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-…
> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to.
This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops.
> Asking it requires skill.
Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this.
> and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece.
Prompt your LLM of choice to generate 100 articles about different aspects of joining a new role, then you won’t need to provide the insights into the specific situations the author described. All you need to do is pay for the tokens.
> Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”?
Yes.
> Well, you didn’t.
Do you know that? What’s stopping someone from asking an LLM to generate an entire HN front page worth of articles, and reading that list instead of HN?
This really is a problem with the health of the site in my opinion. If there are a flood of AI generated articles in the top spot, the value proposition of HN as a site is diminished.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#68This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely. I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me. I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same. Edit: I'd like to add that I…
I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-…
AIDR
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article. AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-…
> AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. This is not entirely accurate if we consider agentic loops. > Asking it requires skill. Considering the realm of writing a blog post instead of programming, what is the skill? I suspect there is extremely little. But I could be wrong, tell me what skill you think went into this. > and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece. Prompt your LLM of choic…
Author here: I dictated this article into my phone and got a model to transcribe and clean up / reword.
I'd argue that counts as using AI as a tool for conveying my original thoughts.
Re: Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are, While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO. The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are gett…
Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly,…
Any workable management approach relies on not managing down further than your direct reports, and believing what they say. Otherwise you've eliminated that layer of middle management, and have to do their work.
It might happen that this is the correct approach, and how to slice things up is often an eternal argument both on an organizational level and technical level.
Unfortunately that gives a lot of power to the middlemen, whoch they might use against you, but that's how the cookie crumbles.