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The Feedback Fallacy

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Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#31

Post by bena »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #30

> The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and experiences Side note, but this strikes me as extremely wrong, based on 35 years of living among humans. Humans have unsurpassed abilities of self-deception, cognitive dissonance tolerance, and building monumental mental models to hide the truth about themselves from themselves. As one economist put it, your 'self'…

I think the error is including experiences.

I am the sole source for what I'm feeling. Whether I admit that or not is another story, but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad.

Now, whether that emotion is justified is another story and whether the related experience should induce sadness can be up for debate and if I'm interpreting the situation correctly and all of that.

But we can't argue that I'm not feeling sad. I would probably have said that "The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and perspectives"

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#32

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

trimmedarticle wrote: post #6

Here's a no JavaScript version of the article that reduces the page size by 99% - from 2.78 MB to 35 KB: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/770

The person below is not wrong... maybe you should add a new path https://beta.trimread.com/hn/${hn_id} and just create a Show HN... I'm sure people would be interested in seeing it.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#34

Post by agoodthrowaway »

endymi0n wrote: post #21

How the author seems to get and present such a distorted view of the original Netflix culture slides (which we modeled quite a lot of our original culture from) is completely beyond me. Nowhere did anybody say that feedback should be a one sided activity, here's the original source for your reference: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11Com... The "Communication" slide (p.11) even _starts_ with t…

Having worked in a large company that is famous for its feedback culture, I think the type of feedback culture you refer to is hard to scale. While I think it helps people improve, I’ve mostly seen how feedback is used to hurt people.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#35

Post by lumost »

agoodthrowaway wrote: post #34
endymi0n wrote: post #21

How the author seems to get and present such a distorted view of the original Netflix culture slides (which we modeled quite a lot of our original culture from) is completely beyond me. Nowhere did anybody say that feedback should be a one sided activity, here's the original source for your reference: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/11-11Com... The "Communication" slide (p.11) even _starts_ with t…

Having worked in a large company that is famous for its feedback culture, I think the type of feedback culture you refer to is hard to scale. While I think it helps people improve, I’ve mostly seen how feedback is used to hurt people.

+1 to this, at scale it's really important to channel feedback on useful topics. Learning that everyone hates working with your authentication system is really quite different than everyone hating the lone maintainer who keeps it alive in their "spare time".

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#36

Post by ummonk »

The part about pain isn’t actually necessarily true. When I was recovering from surgery, they would ask “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?” I imagined how excruciatingly bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the pain...

Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#37

Post by ummonk »

borramakot wrote: post #9

> Adding up all the inaccurate redness ratings—“gray,” “pretty gray,” “whitish gray,” “muddy brown,” and so on—and averaging them leads us further away both from learning anything reliable about the individuals’ personal experiences of the rose and from the actual truth of how red our rose really is. I don't understand this comment. How does averaging noisy signal, even systematically noisy signal, result in somethin…

An individual rating can tell you something about the individual’s experience.

Averaging the ratings of multiple people tells you nothing since it washes out the individual experiences. I.e. individual samples hold meaning about the samples themselves but aggregation of samples is just noise.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#38

Post by stephc_int13 »

Feedback is dangerous for many reasons, but mostly because the signal/noise ratio is mediocre.

The problem with noisy feedback is the instability of the closed-loop system, and it can quickly become erratic and ultimately counter-productive.

Thus, we should only use feedback when the signal is clear and loud, mostly at the extremes, when performance is outstanding or catastrophic.

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#39

Post by Terr_ »

bena wrote: post #31
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #30

> The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and experiences Side note, but this strikes me as extremely wrong, based on 35 years of living among humans. Humans have unsurpassed abilities of self-deception, cognitive dissonance tolerance, and building monumental mental models to hide the truth about themselves from themselves. As one economist put it, your 'self'…

I think the error is including experiences. I am the sole source for what I'm feeling. Whether I admit that or not is another story, but if I think I feel sad, then I feel sad. Now, whether that emotion is justified is another story and whether the related experience should induce sadness can be up for debate and if I'm interpreting the situation correctly and all of that. But we can't argue that I'm not feeling sad.…

Or just modify it to "their own feelings and subjective experiences."

Re: The Feedback Fallacy

#40

Post by _dw7s »

smacktoward wrote: post #7

When I hear people talking up their policy of > “encouraging harsh feedback” and subjecting workers to “intense and awkward” real-time 360s ... I can't help but think how much a review there sounds like a capitalist version of a Maoist "struggle session" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session ). The point of a struggle session wasn't to build people up; it was to tear them down. A culture where the way y…

Oh.. you're not the only one to find similarities between some corporate cultures and oppression mechanisms from communist regimes.

For example, whenever I had to do my yearly review and write in my opinions about what I did good/bad/could have done differently which afterwards were discussed with my manager and then shared among leadership, I couldn't help but think of a milder version of https://translate.google.ro/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=https://...

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