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Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

news.cornell.edu

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Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#281

Post by VorpalWay »

andrewflnr wrote: post #251
VorpalWay wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most people" without a proper scientific study. But I disagree: following the scientific principle, and being willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and confident without showing their work / sources make me suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a critical skill.

If you actually think and act that way, so much the better. I don't even particularly disbelieve you. But can you really look at the mass of humanity around you and believe they think the same way? Even if they claim to value critical thinking, watch what they do, what they buy, how they vote. You've most likely trained yourself to value critical thinking in your leaders, most likely from an early enough age that you…

Hm, having a journalist and an academic (with a heavy focus on applied rigorous statistics) as parents probably helped there, you are right. But school is supposed to teach this, at least here in Sweden it is a part of the curriculum. But indeed, that doesn't seem to help, and the US it is especially bad (not saying the situation is good here either though).

There are other things I do remember having to train myself to do though, such as not make value judgments based on the language skill level of others. Rationally I have never cared where someone is from and if they are a native speaker or not, but emotionally that required some effort.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#282

Post by didgetmaster »

I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real meaning in plain language.

"Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases.

Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#283

Post by ryukoposting »

didgetmaster wrote: post #282

I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real meaning in plain language. "Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases. Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?

I've generally found it better at doing the opposite: taking readable, concrete terms and obfuscating them into LinkedInish.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#284

Post by red-iron-pine »

ignoramous wrote: post #272
red-iron-pine wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalk https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.

Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...

this reads like an AI clickbait.

it does make Rao's original article a little easier to digest but it was already pretty tight through the first 3-4 parts.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#285

Post by nitwit005 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #282

I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real meaning in plain language. "Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases. Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?

In this study it was randomly generated phrases.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#286

Post by VorpalWay »

sleight42 wrote: post #274

One word: Retroencabulator.

That is done in jest though (technobabel is also used in scifi of the softer variety of course, Star Trek is infamous for it).

Corporate speak is unfortunately used seriously by some people, not just in Dilbert and similar.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#287

Post by nitwit005 »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #157
butILoveLife wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Karl Popper in me says: Its barely useful science because its not falsifiable. Its like a horoscope, it applies to everyone. Its closer to a tautology "Its raining or its not" than a contradiction "Its raining and its not". The closer to contradiction limits the possible realities, which makes it better science. Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.

> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true. As long as you can define some measure of "worse at their jobs", which corporations routinely do, this seems like an easy thing to falsify. Go get employee eval scores and poll everyone on whether they eat breakfast.

That sort of method has proven problematic, as the thing that matters could be something correlated with breakfast, and the breakfast itself could be irrelevant.

You usually have to ask people to change their behavior. Pretty straight forward in this case though.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#288

Post by nostrademons »

jvanderbot wrote: post #164

It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language. Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability. A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time. A senior director…

> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.

Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.

If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#289

Post by wisty »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #260
sp1nningaway wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift. Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history cou…

> The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is described as: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straig…

Yes I too have seen the 2022 Perun video where an Australian Youtuber gives a lesson on Russian linguisics, but I'm not certain he's right.

English also has more than one words for lies - lies, falsehoods, fibs, bs, prevarication.

Yeah sometimes we know stuff is a load of crap at work, but we gotta humour the process. Maybe it's 10x as bad in Russia. But I've seen little independent evidence those words Perun used mean completely different things, I think he's just accidently exhaggerating a possible bit of nuance.

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