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Against Productivity

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Re: Against Productivity

#81

Post by nindalf »

calinet6 wrote: post #70
hliyan wrote: post #42

"Above all we become interesting [sic] in measuring ourselves. Word count/day, lines of code/day, hamburgers served/hour, steps taken/day, test questions/100, money earned/field’s average salary. We got quarterly reviews, job evaluations, and tested certifications." I've a dilemma: I've come to believe that this really is a bad thing, not just because we're suboptimizing output at the expense of quality of life, but…

Just remove the individual metric. We know they don't work. Incentivize the entire company for the success of the company. Pay people fairly in an uncomplicated way. Align all the incentives and don't reward anything that is not directly connected to the clear and well-communicated success of the company.

So even if I do the bare minimum at work, I should be rewarded the same as someone who worked his pants off? Sure, that's fine. Just one thing, that guy who was working his pants off no longer has the incentive to work hard because his reward is tied to how the company as a whole does. He will begin to do the bare minimum, and the company suffers.

He will eventually become jaded with this and leave to some place that will recognise and reward his extra output.

Re: Against Productivity

#82

Post by calinet6 »

chromaton wrote: post #6

805 million people on earth don't have enough to eat. 783 million don't have access to clean water. 1.9 million die of diarrhea every year. 176 million African adults can't read. And this guy sits around the first world for a couple years with the back of his hand nailed to his forehead. If he can't bring himself to do more than write a couple essays and snap some photos over a couple years, I would suggest a refresh…

In a complex system, productivity is often paradoxical. One realization or idea at the fringes of the random walk of progress can be worth the work of hundreds of millions of people on the known status quo. We need people exploring on the outskirts of reality and knowledge and life as much as we need the workers, and the people who do that are invariably the ones with a connection to their humanity and the humanity of others, like this person.

Your suggestion is sound: see the real world. Sure. But don't disparage humanism and ideation and self-discovery. It is truly our only hope.

Re: Against Productivity

#83

Post by calinet6 »

nindalf wrote: post #81
calinet6 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remove the individual metric. We know they don't work. Incentivize the entire company for the success of the company. Pay people fairly in an uncomplicated way. Align all the incentives and don't reward anything that is not directly connected to the clear and well-communicated success of the company.

So even if I do the bare minimum at work, I should be rewarded the same as someone who worked his pants off? Sure, that's fine. Just one thing, that guy who was working his pants off no longer has the incentive to work hard because his reward is tied to how the company as a whole does. He will begin to do the bare minimum, and the company suffers. He will eventually become jaded with this and leave to some place that…

It turns out what you say is not true in reality, but it persists as the myth of individualism in the corporate workforce. It is simply false; it doesn't happen.

When you align the incentives, uncomplicate rewards, clearly guide people in the same direction toward clear and logical goals, and enable them to do good work they can be proud of, all of that individual infighting and politics goes away.

You can still compensate people fairly for their contributions as measured simply and clearly as "contribution to the success of the company," there's absolutely no reason not to; you just remove the complex measurement and competition that results in the opposite of the desired goal. Simplify.

This is well-understood stuff. It is not new. It resulted quite directly in the success of the Japanese economy after WWII, driven by the teachings of statistician W. Edwards Deming.

We, as Americans, ignore it because of the persistence of myths like the one you mention. Because of our fixation on individual gain and protection, and on a pervasive belief in the incompetence and dishonesty of our fellow man. We fail to see the truth: that the failures around us are a result not of poor individuals, but of systems which surround them and stop anyone except a few unicorns from being able to be effective.

Start with W. Edwards Deming: here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming and here: http://blog.deming.org/

Re: Against Productivity

#84

Post by calinet6 »

pron wrote: post #80
calinet6 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extremely common misconception. Human nature does not mean that our behavior is permanent, set in stone, fixed. Our biological bugs are not our humanity, nor are our biological advantages. We are quite greater than our biology, and we've proven again and again that we are capable of improving upon it. I'll just throw the whole institution of "education" out there as an example.

Well, that's a deep philosophical question of whether there's an essence to humanity. But I think that if by some miracle we can turn humans into rational beings, then our entire set of motivations, aspirations and drives will change. Education does not do that. So far, over the course of history, we have not changed any of what people may call "our nature".

We have turned humans, largely, into much more rational beings than they were in the past. Education and progress does do that, most clearly. There is always human nature, but in the most educated societies, you see a completely different behavioral state.

Re: Against Productivity

#85

Post by JoeAltmaier »

calinet6 wrote: post #84
pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a deep philosophical question of whether there's an essence to humanity. But I think that if by some miracle we can turn humans into rational beings, then our entire set of motivations, aspirations and drives will change. Education does not do that. So far, over the course of history, we have not changed any of what people may call "our nature".

We have turned humans, largely, into much more rational beings than they were in the past. Education and progress does do that, most clearly. There is always human nature, but in the most educated societies, you see a completely different behavioral state.

We have trained people to behave in a mode that appears rational, when examined from the framework of their culture. But that's always been true - even prehistoric people survived according to how well adapted their myths and behaviors were to their environment.

Re: Against Productivity

#86

Post by pron »

calinet6 wrote: post #84
pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a deep philosophical question of whether there's an essence to humanity. But I think that if by some miracle we can turn humans into rational beings, then our entire set of motivations, aspirations and drives will change. Education does not do that. So far, over the course of history, we have not changed any of what people may call "our nature".

We have turned humans, largely, into much more rational beings than they were in the past. Education and progress does do that, most clearly. There is always human nature, but in the most educated societies, you see a completely different behavioral state.

I think most historians would disagree with you. Actually, there's one quite famous study that touches on this topic, The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias. It is a fascinating work, but debated by most historians. One interesting subtopic there is the internalization of the feeling of disgust. Elias shows how disgust -- which we often experience physiologically -- is a social construct that evolved through the ages.

Other than that, it is well accepted that some societies have built large, faceless institutions, and evolved from a face-to-face society to a society of strangers. It is a profound change, but no one claims that such a society is more rational than a face-to-face, let alone its members. The behavioral state you're referring to is largely accepted to be nothing more than social norms in a society of strangers.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process

Re: Against Productivity

#87

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

pron wrote: post #27
ggreer wrote: post #16

This post is full of mistakes and unclear thinking. I can't figure out what the author is arguing against or for. Is she against quantifying wealth? I'm not sure. Is she against working hard? Maybe. Does she think it impossible to quantify happiness and well-being? I get the impression she does. First, the author made a huge mistake when talking about GDP. Her comparison used absolute instead of per-capita values. In…

> This really irks me. Measuring and quantifying something is a prerequisite to optimizing it. In Notes from Underground the hero attains his own measure of happiness through spite, i.e. self harm, i.e. misery. Any measure of human happiness is contradictory, or it wouldn't be human. Try to imagine the most perfect utopia you can, where any measure you come up with is maximized, or optimized (to use the SV parlance).…

I would say that people are happy when they have what they want. The great thing is, there are 2 variables there, and you can control either one. Most people try to change the "what you have" variable, but it's easier to change the "what you want" variable.

Re: Against Productivity

#88

Post by barbudorojo »

Trying to summarize the post: Free time can increase your wisdom and is necessary sometimes for higher order thinking. Too much productivity, that is not having time for your mind wandering, produces a bad effect in society. To compose that post has taken the author four months.

I think that every great writer has been many times in his life waiting for inspiration. But inspiration only occurs when you are inviting inspiration to come by working a lot, your mind has to be struggling with the problem, at least in a subconscious level, and then, suddenly, inspiration comes to your rescue.

Re: Against Productivity

#89

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

jokoon wrote: post #69
charlespwd wrote: post #10

Fantastic piece. I believe in similar things. Here, where I currently live, we spend so much time working and being productive that we forget to ask questions. "Why am I doing this?" "What is the meaning of it?" "What is really important?" Then we end up lost, depressed and what not. Not all of us do, but some? Certainly. We do it because others do it. Because we believe that pursuing a different venue is not realist…

Sometime I wonder about the "meaning of life", but the real question is "what is the purpose of civilization?". Cynics could argue that civilization is like a cancer, thus we should make sure civilization grows as fast and as big as possible to survive a cataclysm or to make sure one's country wins a future war. That's the only argument to have higher standards and incentives to be productive, just so that society ca…

There used to be multiple civilizations. There still are, but there are less of them. Connecting the world is turning us into a monoculture, and as biologists know, monocultures are extremely vulnerable to diseases wiping them out.

I think we should encourage localized micro-civilizations, if only to keep the species safe. For example, capitalism has become the system that the world runs on. Pretty much all of us exchange currency for goods. But there are lots of failure modes for this system. To keep ourselves safe, we should encourage enclaves with alternative economic systems like bartering and collectivism.

Unfortunately, in the US at least, if someone suggests that capitalism might not be the best for everybody, they get labeled as a "socialist" and shunned.

Re: Against Productivity

#90

Post by shoover »

What really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism's perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed.

Ouch.

We are productive without price. Not because people aren't dying, they surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is no price because there's no measure to quantify what we are losing.

This makes me wonder how history will look on our mental health issues, as we look back on alcoholism in early 20th century America.

For those sympathetic to the views of the article, I can't recommend enough Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft for a fuller and prescriptive discussion of the history and philosophy of these issues of work and meaning and mental health.

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