I think you would enjoy learning about the way Ray Dalio and Bridgewater make decisions and the culture there. It is all about getting it right. I have other issues with that firm that are better to discuss in private, but I think the way they have created a culture is fascinating.
I would also note that when I worked at Microsoft, there was a strong emphasis on building consensus. This meant that teams moved very slowly and it was hard to just be a strong visionary and push forward with a point of view that you believe in.
Clearly there is a individual conflict between personal gain and group success. It is talked about in battles between monkey troops where each is hesitant to fight for fear of personal safety but can't totally retreat for fear of being demoted or ostracized within their troop. This all brings to mind the framing of humans being 90% bee and 10% monkey. I don't remember if that gets into the same issue but it is certainly relevant. We want most people to go along most of the time. The dissenters rarely prosper yet they perform an important role.
I just wanted to thank you (and Robin Hanson) for clearly articulating what I’ve experienced at work... I’m very outcome oriented, and I’ve had jobs where the company I worked for started as very outcome-oriented, and drifted to consensus-oriented - as the company becomes more successful, with more spoils to be distributed, and growth drives more bureaucracy. It’s hard to understand what’s going on when it’s happening, but this outcome/consensus games framing is helpful.
As I read this top post and Robin’s post, I’m thinking “what about the genetic part of lower Black IQs?” Huemer remains too intellectually cowardly, unwilling to seek truth or state the truth as known, on this question. Arnold, too, refuses to say it, tho is willing to point out that Huemer won’t even discuss that topic, despite the fact that “Black and White IQs are genetically equal” is the single most damaging and false Progressive myth. (= Liberal myth.)
Blacks, on average, have lower IQs—and a significant reason is genetic. 30-50-80% is not yet established how much.
“Liberalism” and the search for T truth, are being destroyed by the denial of this truth. Before we can mitigate this unfair aspect of Reality, God given or random, we need to be able to honestly talk about.
Society needs to create more jobs for low IQ people, and focus more status on those people who are virtuous.
"Almost any time a senior manager calls a meeting to discuss a decision, the desired outcome of the meeting is predetermined." With respect, this claim has not been my experience, either as a member or leader of a team.
Rather, I learned a technique called a "go round" to ensure all team members get the chance to speak with the leader offering the issue up front and their opinion at the end. To the extent the leader is transparent with their original and revised opinion, they will build trust. My experience may be due to being a general manager, which role tends to integrate the opinions of functional experts into a business decision, but I don't think so.
Further, in a high growth business, time pressures tend to preclude wasting time on fake decision-making processes. Us ENTJs will typically announce an answer if we're confident in it.
"At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself."
So if you want to play the truth-seeking game, continually be a founder or first employee!
Argumentum ad straw man ad irrevelentium (sorry I don't know Latin).
Rather than respond to Arnold's point -- that Jay Bhattacharya is lucky to have called it like he saw it (against the consensus) and lived to tell the tale -- you attack Bhattacharya's credentials.
The future director of the National Institute of Health, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, has already disqualified himself for the role on numerous occasions. However, what's most inspiring is Bhattacharya's insistence that not only was SARS-CoV-2 engineered in a lab, but that we should have been mass infecting children, their teachers, and their families in the spring of 2020 as hospitals in New York were being overwhelmed and mass graves were being filled. While this could easily be written off as a mere case of Dunning-Kreuger fueled by social media, one has to acknowledge the bravery of Bhattacharya's calls for enlisting countless American children to play a central role in getting their parents killed, liberating these free thinkers from the constraints of matriarchal tyranny that have made America so weak.
Bhattacharya has saw fit to attach his name to a number of astroturfed organizations, from the Great Barrington Declaration online petition to the Brownstone Institute to the Norfolk Group to The Illusion of Consensus to Biosafety Now, in the hopes that his credentials as a Stanford academic will grant them legitimacy in misleading the public about COVID-19. Bhattacharya is now slated become the director of the National Institute of Health, the world's leading hub for medical and scientific research. We should all celebrate Jay Bhattacharya's commitment to absolutely nothing except his own personal enrichment, by any means necessary.
There is a great military corollary to this, from the legendary Air Force Colonel John Boyd, about whether you should “do something, or be someone” (I'm paraphrasing).
If false beliefs are barnacles to an organization (and the organization/institution is a ship), what is the threshold for barnacle accumulation past which the ship no longer sails?
When monitoring costs are high, and plausible deniability is high, what norms and filters can be used to select people who will not free ride?
Another grand slam by Arnold Kling! Glad you’re on my team. I have an answer for this: “Why do beliefs with little truth value become ‘sticky’? Is it because they signal membership in a tribe? Do they play a role in status competition between and within tribes?” One answer and something that might be missing from this post is that the process of determining the truth runs in tandem with the process of determining what works best for the group. Groups do not live in isolation. They compete and cooperate against other groups. Cooperation and competition within a group only has to be “good enough” relative to the other groups. So as Peter Gray writes about the Good Enough Parent, we might write about the Good Enough Employee. The Good Enough Employee survives. Extending this idea to human life, animal life and all living things, we can imagine a set of precepts by which Good Enough Organisms carry on their genes to what might be called infinity. Infinity being a concept that we can’t completely understand in the context of time and space.
I think you would enjoy learning about the way Ray Dalio and Bridgewater make decisions and the culture there. It is all about getting it right. I have other issues with that firm that are better to discuss in private, but I think the way they have created a culture is fascinating.
I would also note that when I worked at Microsoft, there was a strong emphasis on building consensus. This meant that teams moved very slowly and it was hard to just be a strong visionary and push forward with a point of view that you believe in.
Clearly there is a individual conflict between personal gain and group success. It is talked about in battles between monkey troops where each is hesitant to fight for fear of personal safety but can't totally retreat for fear of being demoted or ostracized within their troop. This all brings to mind the framing of humans being 90% bee and 10% monkey. I don't remember if that gets into the same issue but it is certainly relevant. We want most people to go along most of the time. The dissenters rarely prosper yet they perform an important role.
I believe that Haidt says that we are 90 percent chimp, 10 percent bee
Right. So the bit about dissenters probably comes from elsewhere.
I just wanted to thank you (and Robin Hanson) for clearly articulating what I’ve experienced at work... I’m very outcome oriented, and I’ve had jobs where the company I worked for started as very outcome-oriented, and drifted to consensus-oriented - as the company becomes more successful, with more spoils to be distributed, and growth drives more bureaucracy. It’s hard to understand what’s going on when it’s happening, but this outcome/consensus games framing is helpful.
As I read this top post and Robin’s post, I’m thinking “what about the genetic part of lower Black IQs?” Huemer remains too intellectually cowardly, unwilling to seek truth or state the truth as known, on this question. Arnold, too, refuses to say it, tho is willing to point out that Huemer won’t even discuss that topic, despite the fact that “Black and White IQs are genetically equal” is the single most damaging and false Progressive myth. (= Liberal myth.)
Blacks, on average, have lower IQs—and a significant reason is genetic. 30-50-80% is not yet established how much.
“Liberalism” and the search for T truth, are being destroyed by the denial of this truth. Before we can mitigate this unfair aspect of Reality, God given or random, we need to be able to honestly talk about.
Society needs to create more jobs for low IQ people, and focus more status on those people who are virtuous.
"Almost any time a senior manager calls a meeting to discuss a decision, the desired outcome of the meeting is predetermined." With respect, this claim has not been my experience, either as a member or leader of a team.
Rather, I learned a technique called a "go round" to ensure all team members get the chance to speak with the leader offering the issue up front and their opinion at the end. To the extent the leader is transparent with their original and revised opinion, they will build trust. My experience may be due to being a general manager, which role tends to integrate the opinions of functional experts into a business decision, but I don't think so.
Further, in a high growth business, time pressures tend to preclude wasting time on fake decision-making processes. Us ENTJs will typically announce an answer if we're confident in it.
"At first the founders and first employees are betting on the firm, but later folks are betting on rising in the firm, not so much on the firm itself."
So if you want to play the truth-seeking game, continually be a founder or first employee!
Leave when it gets too stable.
Jay Bhattacharya is not a Medical Doctor
He's an economist-a quack; impersonating one.
context note: Bhattacharya obtained an MD in 1997
Duly noted
Argumentum ad straw man ad irrevelentium (sorry I don't know Latin).
Rather than respond to Arnold's point -- that Jay Bhattacharya is lucky to have called it like he saw it (against the consensus) and lived to tell the tale -- you attack Bhattacharya's credentials.
Learn Latin
The future director of the National Institute of Health, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, has already disqualified himself for the role on numerous occasions. However, what's most inspiring is Bhattacharya's insistence that not only was SARS-CoV-2 engineered in a lab, but that we should have been mass infecting children, their teachers, and their families in the spring of 2020 as hospitals in New York were being overwhelmed and mass graves were being filled. While this could easily be written off as a mere case of Dunning-Kreuger fueled by social media, one has to acknowledge the bravery of Bhattacharya's calls for enlisting countless American children to play a central role in getting their parents killed, liberating these free thinkers from the constraints of matriarchal tyranny that have made America so weak.
Bhattacharya has saw fit to attach his name to a number of astroturfed organizations, from the Great Barrington Declaration online petition to the Brownstone Institute to the Norfolk Group to The Illusion of Consensus to Biosafety Now, in the hopes that his credentials as a Stanford academic will grant them legitimacy in misleading the public about COVID-19. Bhattacharya is now slated become the director of the National Institute of Health, the world's leading hub for medical and scientific research. We should all celebrate Jay Bhattacharya's commitment to absolutely nothing except his own personal enrichment, by any means necessary.
There is a great military corollary to this, from the legendary Air Force Colonel John Boyd, about whether you should “do something, or be someone” (I'm paraphrasing).
When does a false belief serve our self-interest?
If false beliefs are barnacles to an organization (and the organization/institution is a ship), what is the threshold for barnacle accumulation past which the ship no longer sails?
When monitoring costs are high, and plausible deniability is high, what norms and filters can be used to select people who will not free ride?
Maybe we don't sanction mortal combat but anybody who watches MMA or even the NFL knows we're not that far from it.
Another grand slam by Arnold Kling! Glad you’re on my team. I have an answer for this: “Why do beliefs with little truth value become ‘sticky’? Is it because they signal membership in a tribe? Do they play a role in status competition between and within tribes?” One answer and something that might be missing from this post is that the process of determining the truth runs in tandem with the process of determining what works best for the group. Groups do not live in isolation. They compete and cooperate against other groups. Cooperation and competition within a group only has to be “good enough” relative to the other groups. So as Peter Gray writes about the Good Enough Parent, we might write about the Good Enough Employee. The Good Enough Employee survives. Extending this idea to human life, animal life and all living things, we can imagine a set of precepts by which Good Enough Organisms carry on their genes to what might be called infinity. Infinity being a concept that we can’t completely understand in the context of time and space.