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Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#81

Post by phendrenad2 »

hnuser847 wrote: post #65
trentnix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bure…

This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).

I think this might just be a special case of Type II. By latching onto the latest hot issue (like the Linux Foundation getting into Vaccine Passports... or, less subtly, the Firefox organization rebranding as a "global crew of activists"), you get to collect donations from government and public grants related to the issue. And corporate donations, too, because your good "ESG score" transitively applies to your supporters.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#82

Post by latentsea »

hnuser847 wrote: post #65
trentnix wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bure…

This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).

They are devoted to themselves.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#83

Post by potato3732842 »

astrange wrote: post #69
rhubarbtree wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA academics. A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there. The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership. They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.

You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too. Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditio…

The way you "manage" them is you water down their impact on the organization with a bunch of people who aren't academics.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#84

Post by LatteLazy »

Animats wrote: post #72

"ATI has recently notified about 50 staff – or approximately 10% of its workforce – that they are at risk of redundancy and is shutting down projects related to online safety, tackling the housing crisis and reducing health inequality." Why did they have projects in those areas at all?

The UK has a bunch of serious issues.

But actually fixing them would require hard decisions.

So our government wants to look like it is frantically working to achieve these things (fix our housing crisis etc). But absolutely not making the changes needed.

So they announce things like the Turing institute to look busy. Then dump weird requirements on it to look like they’re doing things. Then defund it (because it was never meant to be a real thing, just a donkey to pin press releases on).

See also the “Spaceports” we built, our “massive breakthroughs” in fusion energy and SMRs, Heathrow extension etc…

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#85

Post by philipallstar »

troad wrote: post #74
homefree wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value. It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.

The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here. I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive…

> What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here.

In the UK, poor people can afford food that's sold at a profit. They're given free money.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#86

Post by homefree »

troad wrote: post #74
homefree wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value. It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.

The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here. I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive…

In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.

At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.

This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#87

Post by Yeul »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #39
prox wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as Douglas Adams stated in the problem with ruling axiom, is that under no circumstance should you allow someone who gets themselves in a position to rule, rule.

At least some greek states used to assign leadership in a lottery system designed in such a way partially to avoid the issues with this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion

Lol this is a terrible system because most people do not under any circumstance want to be bothered with wasting their time on this shit.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#88

Post by qcnguy »

astrange wrote: post #69
rhubarbtree wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AKA academics. A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there. The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership. They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.

You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too. Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditio…

Eh no not really. Google's early success came from PhD dropouts (Larry Page & Sergey Brin), combined with people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (formerly at DEC), and the lesser known but no less critical Eric Veach (formerly Pixar).

Those are the people behind the core innovations that made Google so powerful: PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, the indexing pipeline, protobufs/Stubby, GFS, AdWords, AdSense and the use of ML in both (iirc Veach was a key reason the ads system worked so well).

So none of the names I associate with early Google were academics. They all came from industry.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#89

Post by qcnguy »

troad wrote: post #74
homefree wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value. It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.

The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here. I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive…

How are non-profits "accountable" to the poor? Are the poor going to threaten to stop giving them donations if they don't shape up? You seem to contradict yourself when you say that indeed if the soup kitchen upsets you then you can't do anything about it. Thus the soup kitchen isn't accountable to the poor who use it.

I think non-profits are accountable to their donors but the problem with charity is that the donors are giving money mostly to be seen to give money. They rarely care much about outcomes. Indeed if the non-profit actually solved the problem they were set up to tackle the donors would have a problem as now they'd need to find a new cause to demonstrate their philanthropic loveliness with.

And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#90

Post by Yeul »

incone123 wrote: post #58
theossuary wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he had done that work after they castrated him and drove him to suicide, sure, but that wasn't the order of events.

Had he not bothered with the work and the axis powers had been victorious, we would be executing homosexuals today. Modern threats from Russia and Iran hardly bode any better. Your reasoning that putting his name on an institution that does as much liberal arts as it does science is ok but not if it does defence work, is hard to fathom.

Considering the Christ fascism of the US we should not pat ourselves on the back
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