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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#471

Post by 1dom »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #442
smokel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 500 years ago, what were people worried about? It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed. Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

I think there is a difference in the shear density and speed of information. With modern news and social media apps, information can be pushed into someone in a way that just wasn't possible that long ago.

I agree, I think it relates to the number of channels we're exposed to at any one time. Think about the rate at which that has changed over the past 20, 200 and 20,000 years. Now think how our biology has changed to handle that. And then think how our social structures and work time expectations have changed over the same time periods.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#472

Post by codr7 »

0_____0 wrote: post #57
sndean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while. In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and…

I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there. They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility…

I worked several different SW roles in Norway last year, it was the opposite; I now suspect the entire country is simply faking it until they run out of oil.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#473

Post by seadan83 »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
palmotea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride…

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

The focus on short term results could generally be true. Perhaps... generally nothing is true though of course.

(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).

(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.

(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).

(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#474

Post by neilv »

flkiwi wrote: post #385

I keep experiencing absolutely mediocre middle manager types challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..." The outsourcing of the most basic thinking by people who would rather do anything other than think is, paradoxically, creating a bonanza for people like me who end up having to do the thinking for them (and clean up their m…

> challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..."

This might be a variation on one I've seen a few times: I'm an expert on something, and advising someone who wants to instead go with advice from their friend who isn't even involved.

(And who usually has little-to-no experience in the thing. But it's like calling up your nephew at Google to ask why your computer is slow. After the knowledgeable neighbor who looked at it already told them it's because they have very little RAM, and they're pushed into swap by this one program they installed. But the Google nephew hears "home PC slow", says they probably picked up a bunch of malware, and to reinstall Windows, and please stop calling during work hours.)

I think this can be a psychological quirk, or social dynamics pressure, or an inability to assess competence due to a lack of understanding of the field/subfield.

If I had to guess, I'd say the last one is probably the factor in being overruled by ChatGPT.

One end-run around that is to have some validation of your expertise in the decision-maker's mind, and it might be stupid. For example, in the minds of some decision-makers, if the person has some credential they value ("They went to MIT!", "They worked at Google!", "I'm paying out the nose for their consulting fee!") the decision-maker will put a lot more weight on that person. Maybe even more weight than they give the ChatGPT superintelligence they imagine. It's nice to be listened to, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#476

Post by thewebguyd »

potato3732842 wrote: post #84
biophysboy wrote: post #35

I think people right now are way too willing to surrender their own judgment. AI is an example of this, but there are many others: restaurant ratings, movie metascores, political polls, college rankings, engagement metrics, etc. These kinds of data should be a part of decision making, but not all of it. Otherwise, you get this passive, "who cares" mentality that the author describes.

With that judgment they are surrendering responsibility. "don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization in the western world.

> "don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization in the western world.

Same thing as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." They aren't just surrendering responsibility, but accountability as well.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#477

Post by mobileturdfctry »

One thing I learned about my career in tech. Small companies tend to operate a little more so as meritocracies than large corporations.

The real incentive in large corporations / organizations seems to be about "building strong relationships / trust with people in power". Not about "becoming good at what you do".

This incentive structure was probably fine in a "post-industrial age", but is very wrong for the "information age". Eventually I think this way of thinking / organizing will go away via natural selection , but probably (sadly) not until most of us are dead. Because there are so many entrenched interests who espouse this kind of hierarchy.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#478

Post by tim333 »

gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#479

Post by robotnikman »

saubeidl wrote: post #198
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

It was a place where people lived good lives and had plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free education and healthcare. I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

>I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#480

Post by lamename »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
palmotea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride…

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

Have you ever noticed that stocks can go up as enshittification also goes up?
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