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Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

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Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#201

Post by ModernMech »

ahelwer wrote: post #71
ModernMech wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be the way you describe, and I found it left me without any convictions. I used to think that was okay, because I reasoned with myself that convictions are irrational if not backed by data. Then I got older and realized how easy it is to frame and manipulate data and “facts” to achieve any desired result on the part of the person disseminating the facts. I realized that having some base convictions was a wa…

You may be interested in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Pretty impressive you’ve come to the conclusions you have, I’d say. I suspect many of us choose these points of view by their explanatory power. There will always be some social phenomena that elude explanation by any given point of view, of course.

Thanks for the recommendation I will check it out! Although I can't say that I've come to these realizations all on my own -- I've had a lot of great mentors, friends, and therapists help me on the way.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#202

Post by Zigurd »

alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

People like to think of businesses as rational. Financial ratios have meaning. But businesses are evidently very susceptible to pseudoscience. They seldom hold management practices to the same standards as finance. So you get bunk like Myers-Briggs tests and Agile "velocity," which, unlike real velocity that needs units over time, is unitless and inconsistent "story points" over time.

It isn't harmless. It is sand in the gears. Especially when human mismeasures and biases need to be kept out of ML systems, baking bunk into systems results in lasting damage.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#203

Post by xwolfi »

hermannj314 wrote: post #29

I struggle often with this somewhat arbitrary desire for everything to be data-driven and backed by science. People hope, pray, follow best practices, listen to advice on the internet and yet, every now and then we are reminded that only fools do these things. Really intelligent people only listen to science and do things backed by science and lots of data. How does anyone accomplish anything if every step they take…

Well I mean, if people were like you said, we would have data and science, not rubbish and cultism like this book...

Where is the frigging data ? Where is the scientific process ??

Don't choose a color personality and then exclude team mates based on their "opposed" colors, I beg you. You can like fables, but we can't regress that low.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#204

Post by iiv »

dathinab wrote: post #79

> Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > Green: patient, considerate, nice > Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal If that's the definition it's a catastrophe. A lot of entries listed are skills you can (and do) learn for specific situations, and which just some people do to some degree apply to all parts of their live. But someone applying "patient" to all their live doesn'…

Yes, that is the definition (I am Swedish and I've endured many people asking me my "colour".) It's absurd, isn't it? Especially using so many emotive words.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#205

Post by brabel »

I see a lot of so-called software experts fall into the exact same category as the author of that book... believing themselves to be experts just because they worked in the field for a while, despite having no scientific training, or any relevant training for that matter, no serious studies backing up whatever they promote, nothing except for a lot of gut feeling and on-the-job "hands-on knowledge", exactly as the author of this book who believed himself to be an expert in communication and psychology despite lacking even a basic understanding of that.

We should apply the same kind of scrutinization when it comes to the software industry IMO. Just because you wrote code for a few years and managed a team later, doesn't mean anything you learned is applicable to anyone else. Imagine doctors going around experimenting on people and "learning hands-on" what works and what doesn't. Or even electricians or plumbers... yet, here we are, and I feel like it's exactly what we're doing with software development.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#206

Post by xwolfi »

teekert wrote: post #7

I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course. After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it cam…

> Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue.

They are not. They are like everyone, impatient and loving, violent and helpful, worried and self-assured. The article is very clear that what seems to matter is CONTEXT and we all can understand it.

I'll explain patiently to my kid something I'd literally tear a new one for a senior colleague.

So no your colleagues don't have personality colors, but the organization molds from them certain behaviors that are either helpful to navigate it or to tolerate it. I worked in both startups and giga bank, I can tell you I'm not the same person in both styles of companies...

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#207

Post by ahelwer »

whimsicalism wrote: post #123
ahelwer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, someone like Taleb would say that human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing. So we have writings thousands of years old on what people thought about how other people work. These have been subject to the best truth filter we know of: time. So you’ll learn more about how your fellow humans operate by reading the classics than whatever bullshit ps…

> human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing I've seen statements of this sort very frequently - ie. that the "behaviorally modern" human evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm curious what the backing of such claims are. It seems profoundly unintuitive to me that human behavior would remain evolutionarily unchanged over tens to hundr…

If the wisdom of the classics stopped being applicable to modern times then they would die out and stop being read. So, only the observations remain that are most stable, general, and enduring over time.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#208

Post by ahelwer »

brabel wrote: post #205

I see a lot of so-called software experts fall into the exact same category as the author of that book... believing themselves to be experts just because they worked in the field for a while, despite having no scientific training, or any relevant training for that matter, no serious studies backing up whatever they promote, nothing except for a lot of gut feeling and on-the-job "hands-on knowledge", exactly as the au…

Doctors are essentially useless after graduating medical school and only reach professional proficiency after running the gauntlet of years of intense hands-on medical residency training (where there are more mistakes made than is generally polite to admit). Ask a doctor about this, literally any doctor.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#210

Post by beaconstudios »

Jensson wrote: post #196
beaconstudios wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to frame your position as the default, but it isn't. I've never heard anybody describe meditation as "basically a nap" before. You're also jumping around in your position - first it's "meditation is sleep" now it's "meditation is time you're not stressing". Sleep does more than just allow you to escape stress. The latter is more like comparing meditation to escapist entertainment. The simple explanation…

> I've never heard anybody describe meditation as "basically a nap" before. > You're also jumping around in your position - first it's "meditation is sleep" now it's "meditation is time you're not stressing". I wasn't the one who said meditation is a nap. Stop arguing that point. I do however doubt that there is anything special about meditation. And the process of taking a nap has a lot of similar parts to taking a…

OK so this is an anti-religion thing? Because mindfulness and meditation, while linked with religion, does not require the religious aspect to function. I mean hell, Buddhism doesn't have a God, nor (depending on the sect) any supernatural elements.

You can be skeptical all you want, but rejecting practices purely because they started out with religious explanations is just as irrational as accepting them because of those same reasons. Many medicines are based on natural substances that were initially based on traditional and herbal remedies and I'm sure they were originally given religious explanations - religion was basically the stopgap explanation for anything we didn't understand back in ancient history.

And for what it's worth, I'm a radical materialist.

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