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The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

madeddu.xyz

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Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#11

Post by KUcxrAVrtI »

dvt wrote: post #8

This is the kind of project that is going to get upvoted on HN because it's technically "interesting," but not super-deep. Unfortunately it's, in practice, completely worthless. Long post ahead, so apologies in advance. 1) First, let's look at the premise: > But this time, let’s analyze the things from a mathematical perspective - because today if you don’t speak about data and models, nobody hears you. Let’s give th…

>This is nonsense, not to mention completely arbitrary.

Yes, the graph isn't un-directed and at best you will have information only about the nodes you can reach from your current node, with the edge weight unknown until you have traversed them and dynamic.

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#12

Post by TimTheTinker »

Nevermark wrote: post #7
circles_for-day wrote: post #2

this post will benefit from heavy editing. Remove sentences unrelated to the main story arc. Introspection and reflection are only interesting to your self. You can remove anything resembling those too. Seems like a cool concept. I look forward to reading it.

I agree, the prioritization of humor over clarity creates a wall of distraction and frustration for me. If you have something important to say, say it as clearly as you can. Use humor sparingly and only when it emphasizes a real point that naturally contains some humor or irony, not as the main ingredient. The rare exception is when someone has an absolutely wickedly clever sense of humor that is so funny and enlight…

> an absolutely wickedly clever sense of humor that is so funny and enlightening you can't help reading

That describes G. K. Chesterton to a T.

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#13

Post by alexandercrohde »

circles_for-day wrote: post #2

this post will benefit from heavy editing. Remove sentences unrelated to the main story arc. Introspection and reflection are only interesting to your self. You can remove anything resembling those too. Seems like a cool concept. I look forward to reading it.

I agree.

I'd challenge whoever is upvoting this to distill it to a few essential points (a tl; dr: even) that are worthy takeaways.

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#15

Post by monkeydreams »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #12
Nevermark wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the prioritization of humor over clarity creates a wall of distraction and frustration for me. If you have something important to say, say it as clearly as you can. Use humor sparingly and only when it emphasizes a real point that naturally contains some humor or irony, not as the main ingredient. The rare exception is when someone has an absolutely wickedly clever sense of humor that is so funny and enlight…

> an absolutely wickedly clever sense of humor that is so funny and enlightening you can't help reading That describes G. K. Chesterton to a T.

Yes, but he used humor as an integral part of the explanation, not as an aside. "Dear Professor Whirlwind" is my favourite example of this.

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#16

Post by s_Hogg »

dvt wrote: post #8

This is the kind of project that is going to get upvoted on HN because it's technically "interesting," but not super-deep. Unfortunately it's, in practice, completely worthless. Long post ahead, so apologies in advance. 1) First, let's look at the premise: > But this time, let’s analyze the things from a mathematical perspective - because today if you don’t speak about data and models, nobody hears you. Let’s give th…

It's actually kind of interesting how obfuscated his point is. The idea that incentives are misaligned inside a company of more than negligible scale has been a known problem for as long as we've had companies, more or less. The way he's making that point manages to both obfuscate and weaken it.

Never bury the lead in your writing!

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#17

Post by iciac »

dvt wrote: post #8

This is the kind of project that is going to get upvoted on HN because it's technically "interesting," but not super-deep. Unfortunately it's, in practice, completely worthless. Long post ahead, so apologies in advance. 1) First, let's look at the premise: > But this time, let’s analyze the things from a mathematical perspective - because today if you don’t speak about data and models, nobody hears you. Let’s give th…

Best to read this blog as an example of economic behaviour explained through a graph - valuable in itself, as even basic graph theory concepts rarely make it onto an economics curriculum. Which is a shame, given how neatly algorithmic thinking and complexity costs improve a standard rational agent model (e.g. a few behavioural economic concepts, such as myopic discounting, pop out naturally if you assume mental costs to imagining future states).

Conceptually, it's interesting and potentially foreign to the target reader - more formal definitions can wait for an academic paper rather than a casual blog.

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#18

Post by made2591 »

Hi, all :-) I'm the author. First of all, thank you, everyone, for your comments and interests: they are really appreciated and I think everyone touched somehow different things I thought as well before publishing it.

Excluding the fact that it could be written differently, more concise, more clear, etc - by the way, thank you for links and suggestions as well - the overall idea behind this post was to provide a 50-50 footprint (both funny and serious) around the human behavior in a complex organization. I think the first sentence that gives the reader an idea of the context in which the post will be placed is in the "[..], because today if you don’t speak about data and models, nobody hears you." But... I didn't think a lot about this sentence, I think it was just for laziness, and I don't wanna give my opinion over this topic.

Back to the Prim behavior, I think this is all human and, by the way, shared across all people in every kind of organization, not only inside companies. I mean, not the algorithm, but - bringing it to the extremes - the human nature of being selfish. The idea of providing a high-level formalism to imagine a common scenario we all live every day came spontaneously to my mind, without being so convinced in the beginning. So I tried to figure out if the metaphor would have been a good fit for this idea I had in my mind. And this is it.

When I finished, I read it many times, and I know the feeling like "what the hell is saying? I'm confused" because I felt the same reading my old posts in the past... I'm not 100% sure, but I think I learned from myself that sometimes I feel good in thinking something simply are weird or difficult to understand. I think it has been, as many other times in the past, an unconscious part of my writing process: I like the idea of being a bit wrong, confused, misleading, just a bit, to give more freedom and let the people change their mind while reading. Being distracted, somehow, arise doubts.

I don't know if I could be able to formalize it in a better way like suggested by iciac, definitely, it wasn't my intention to provide scientific proof or anything mathematically correct as suggested by dvt - and I hoped that incompleteness feeling had explained this better than how much it actually had done - but... again, this is it :-)

And I hope you at least enjoyed this flight of fancy. For any questions, feel free to reach me here, by email, twitter, linkedin, etc.

Have a nice day :-)

Re: The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory

#19

Post by dvt »

iciac wrote: post #17
dvt wrote: post #8

This is the kind of project that is going to get upvoted on HN because it's technically "interesting," but not super-deep. Unfortunately it's, in practice, completely worthless. Long post ahead, so apologies in advance. 1) First, let's look at the premise: > But this time, let’s analyze the things from a mathematical perspective - because today if you don’t speak about data and models, nobody hears you. Let’s give th…

Best to read this blog as an example of economic behaviour explained through a graph - valuable in itself, as even basic graph theory concepts rarely make it onto an economics curriculum. Which is a shame, given how neatly algorithmic thinking and complexity costs improve a standard rational agent model (e.g. a few behavioural economic concepts, such as myopic discounting, pop out naturally if you assume mental costs…

> Best to read this blog as an example of economic behaviour explained through a graph

Not sure if this is good company to keep. Generally speaking, behavioural economic models aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

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