101–110 of 223 posts
Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…
So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…
The validity of any cached data can be a hard problem; in the case of reputation, a problem there is. Still, however imprecise this tool is, its usefulness is so high it's not going to go away from human interactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields li…
I don't think it's true that computers are great at exposing this. Software ranges from the concrete (does this button do anything) to the abstract (does this statistical program have an off by one error that's invisible to customers other than returning somewhat wrong results?). I think there's two competing definitions of 'work' in software - 'it works' as in 'allows for use' which can compete with the 'implements…
Looking at the code can tell you whether it was “implemented properly” - or at least, if it was done reasonably competently.
Relationships, though, can help you know if that properly implemented code was likely a fluke or not. Does the person ask questions? How do they ask questions? How do they communicate? How do they capture requirements? How do they push back when something seems unclear or unwise? etc.
Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, coworkers gravitate towards each other socially because they respect each other's skills. Competence, humility, integrity etc. in your work are a major source of those warm fuzzies.
But humility and integrity are "soft" qualities, outside raw technical prowess. A talented jerk is a scourge of a project (especially in open-source): the engineering might attract others in the short term, but being a jerk makes long-term interactions painful and not very fruitful.
Brilliant jerks are bad, but engineers also tend to resent politicians.
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Steve Jobs didn't own Apple; he'd apparently sold his entire stake around the time he was ousted in 1985 [0]. Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired. But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly. [0] https://www.bus…
The danger with arguing from first principles is that a lot of real-world failures sound pretty fantastic. Take communism, or the satirical "A Modest Proposal".
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> The exact opposite of government control over industry. Only in the sense of "industry control over government". Which doesn't strike me as any improvement. The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor".
> The true opposite would be "industry has to fend for itself without being able to co-opt government to tilt the playing field in its favor". Sure, good point. However I don't think it's possible or desirable to let industry be completely independent of the state. It seems to me that would lead us right back to our current predicament - power would concentrate and it would start putting pressure on the state.
The state itself is a concentration of power. Industry wants to co-opt it for that very reason.
It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
I think it resembles a cubic spline kernel, FWIW.
So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…
The way a former boss explained it to me is that bosses need to form pyramids to support their own ascension. It is just subtribes within the big tribe fighting for power and dominance. Those networks that you form to support your own rise are used by your boss to support their rise. You get promoted because you will make your own boss look better in the future. The second this ceases to be the case, you get discarde…
If you sell a product, there is a different calculus for ascension.
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> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc. I don't li…
Steve Jobs didn't own Apple; he'd apparently sold his entire stake around the time he was ousted in 1985 [0]. Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired. But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly. [0] https://www.bus…
There are concrete examples of worker-dominated organizations: schools, public transit entities, etc., where powerful worker unions dominate policy. They are almost universally unsuccessful, as worker interests take precedence over delivering a product to the consumer.