[HN Gopher] Groups never admit failure
___________________________________________________________________
Groups never admit failure
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-12-08 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nav.al)
(TXT) w3m dump (nav.al)
| gvhst wrote:
| NASA post Apollo 1 fire immediately comes to mind, not quite sure
| what Naval is on about.
| [deleted]
| d--b wrote:
| This honestly sounds like rumblings one should have at a bar, not
| on a blog...
|
| No part of the argument is backed by anything but vague personal
| experience, and the outcome is as far reaching as "for profits
| are better than non profits"
| ndr wrote:
| What bar does a blog need to meet?
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| This article reads like an anecdotal rant.
|
| > Groups never admit failure.
|
| > I'm hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups
| that said, "We thought A, but the answer's actually B."
|
| First statement does not follow from the second. The rest of the
| article is even worse in its sudden jumps to conclusions.
| [deleted]
| clpm4j wrote:
| The author is Naval Ravikant who is a wealthy VC and pseudo-
| philosopher. He's clearly a smart guy but also seemingly
| disconnected from reality at this point in his career.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| A piece that has no facts backing the point, which exploits
| confirmation and conformity biases in readers, is just a
| badly researched and biased piece, regardless of author.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It took a lot of effort, but Japan's Meiji Era civil war was a
| big one.
|
| The Samurai Class said: "This system is not good, and look over
| there, battleships from Western Nations are on our shore. Time to
| modernize and industrialize, and time to retire the Samurai
| system".
|
| Of course, the other half of the Samurai argued otherwise and
| thus the civil war started. Turns out that the side that chose
| guns and industrialization won.
|
| ----------
|
| Arguably, every revolution and civil war was basically a group
| deciding that the old way was bad and that some new way was
| better. But the Meiji Restoration is perhaps the most striking
| example in the past 200 years.
|
| Yes, the "schism" happened as per the blogpost. But the schism
| was fixed and Japan was reunited, fighting as a united front in
| the Russo-Japanese war... proving that Japan had in fact become a
| modern world power.
| HPsquared wrote:
| In that case the group didn't remain intact: it split in two.
| To use the article's language, it's a group that tried to
| change its mind then fell apart as a result.
| dragontamer wrote:
| "The Group" was the Tokugawa Shogunate, a group of Samurai
| who were leading Japan from the 1600s through the mid-1800s.
|
| Some of the Samurai remained pro-Shogunate (the old system of
| power). The others were pro-Imperialists (Emperor Meiji,
| Prime Ministers, Bi-cameral house, etc. etc., and other such
| modernizations).
|
| It was the group that tried to stay on the old Shogunate /
| Samurai system that lost. In part, because the pro-
| Imperialists were some of the most powerful samurai of Japan
| (such as Ito:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%C5%8D_Hirobumi).
|
| In the end, people largely acknowledge the forward thinking
| of Japan's samurai class. The samurai largely convinced other
| samurai (through the old system of war / killing each other),
| that the new Imperial system was better. Turns out that
| Samurai were still good at fighting, even if they were
| fighting to remove themselves from power.
|
| ------
|
| This is a group that fully acknowledged the inefficiency of
| the 1600s-era system of government and Feudal territories
| lorded over by Samurai / Noble warriors.
|
| The pro-imperialist Samurai themselves led the revolution to
| create a new system of government, industrialization, and
| open up trade with the world. Yes, even if it meant ending
| the Samurai powers of old.
| Animats wrote:
| _A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never
| admit, "We made a mistake," because a group that tries to change
| its mind falls apart. I'm hard pressed to find examples in
| history of large groups that said, "We thought A, but the
| answer's actually B."_
|
| Now that is a useful insight.
|
| It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can
| sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacing
| the CEO.
|
| This has come up a few times in military history. "L'audace,
| toujours l'audace" was a WWI French slogan. It took a huge number
| of casualties before high command got it that charging into
| machine guns does not work. Courage does not help. In WWII, a big
| change was discovering that battleships are not useful once the
| enemy has torpedo bombers. The resistance of the battleship
| admirals was overcome by Congress, not the Navy. Congress ordered
| that the captains of aircraft carriers must be qualified to fly
| aircraft. Sidelining the "Gun Club" took major political effort.
|
| Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia",
| which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and
| the usefulness of the A-10.
| asmos7 wrote:
| people have a hard time realizing when the technology they've
| spent their lives learning and perfecting is no longer
| applicable
| salawat wrote:
| People have an equally hard time realizing that there is very
| little genuinely 'new' under the Sun, and today's 'wizbang'
| was yesterday's 'vozalm' with a superficial change to it.
| valec wrote:
| the A-10 is actually the perfect "fighter mafia" plane aside
| from its weight.
|
| the fighter mafia basically wanted more maneuverability,
| cheaper planes and CAS than interdiction bombing. A-10 is all
| of those except light.
|
| they were vehemently opposed to optimizing planes for beyond
| visual range (BVR) combat like by improving sensors or stealth
| because they considered it "a fantasy."
|
| problem is missiles fired 100 miles away don't care what you
| consider fantastical.
|
| the A-10 is actually a giant hunk of junk outside of COIN
| operations. it has no stealth, it's slow and its gun is useless
| against modern armor. against terrorists in flipflops with AKs
| it can be useful but that's only because they don't have any
| sort of AA. even stingers are a huge problem. and in an
| uncontested airspace you may as well bring in a plane with even
| more firepower and loiter time like an ac-130.
|
| so basically the a-10 in this day and age is a solution in
| search of a problem. it's big, slow, heavy and would be shot
| out of the sky in a peer confrontation before you could even
| blink. its gun is useless against modern tanks and an f-35 can
| carry a similar amount of munitions.
| varjag wrote:
| The only reason A-10 is still flying is gun fetishism of
| certain senators.
| ryderfast wrote:
| Usefulness of the A-10? The aircraft that was pulled from the
| early stages of the Gulf war for getting shot up too many
| times, is notorious for blue on blue, and immediately dies in
| the presence of any modern Anti Air?
| derbOac wrote:
| I think the essay is strongly written -- never is a strong word
| -- but it resonated with me because of a personal experience.
|
| In that experience part of the problem was that those who
| disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way
| or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or
| because they were driven away, or something in between. So
| there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "surviving"
| sort of meant staying with the group.
|
| It's interesting to think about how this applies to your WWI
| examples, where the people in the position of admitting mistake
| are still alive, and there's a very literal survivorship bias
| with regard to group membership.
|
| Anyway, when you have an entity that can change in composition,
| it affects what is involved in admitting to mistakes, because
| the people making the mistakes might be different from those
| who would admit to them.
| Symmetry wrote:
| In extreme cases you have evaporative heating of groups where
| after some major setback all the more moderate members leave
| and the remainder are on average more attached to the group
| and more fanatical. This is pretty common to see when
| religious cults have prophesies that fail to pan out.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The WSJ had a piece many years ago about this happening to
| the Muslim Brotherhood as the moderate members, who were
| more visible and accessible, were arrested forcing the
| group to become more fundamentalist. Found that
| interesting. "The more you tighten your grip, the more star
| systems..."
|
| I never did validate if that claim about the Muslim
| Brotherhood stood the test of time but I found the thing
| interesting in the moment.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Indeed - my personal experience of this was at my business -
| I would admit my and our mistakes to the extent that the
| perception became that I was the _source_ of all of our
| failures.
|
| My partner was and is a person who is never wrong, never
| fails, never makes a mistake - it's always someone else who
| stymied his ambitions, or circumstance, or just bad luck.
| Never an error.
|
| I left, after a decade. It was partly of my own volition, but
| the moment I voiced the possibility he, and our investor,
| couldn't show me the door quickly enough.
|
| Now, here's the rub.
|
| I've been gone for nearly six years. In that time their
| revenue has fallen by 80%, their core product has been axed,
| _and I am still the scapegoat_.
|
| Even when they ultimately fail completely, which they will,
| and soon, as none of the issues I identified have been
| addressed, I am certain that they will go down crying "damn
| you, madaxe_again".
|
| Reality, commercial or not, is purely a matter of perception.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Actually I think any organism or group that can balance
| certainty and observation is peak.
| VLM wrote:
| > the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10
|
| Its really a popularity problem in that there is a doctrine of
| "we need something survivable in BVR and active ADA" but we
| don't like talking about that situation as much as pew-pew
| A-10s are cool and we always plan to fight the last war where
| there was no BVR or ADA threat (not after the first few
| days...)
|
| Inevitably we will someday go up against an opponent that is
| willing to take BVR RoE risks and is capable and willing to do
| ADA (anti-aircraft guns and missiles). At that point the drones
| and A-10s are simply out of the fight, in fact the entire Air
| Force is out of the fight until either another procurement
| cycle or hope that the ground Army, despite having no air
| support at all, somehow knocks out the opfor so our undefended
| planes can fly again.
|
| That's why we have a doctrine, however uncool to talk about, of
| keeping BVR-proof and ADA-proof weapons systems around, there
| is a situation where they're quite useful.
|
| Really its not even ADA-proof, its more generically "capable of
| operating in an environment where we do not already have total
| utter complete air supremacy".
|
| There is a logistical theory that air supremacy is so expensive
| that nobody but the USA can sustain it, although it goes
| guarantee huge USA losses until supremacy is lost, so that's
| not really politically viable. "They're going to wipe our
| ground forces out by air and there's nothing we can do about it
| until they run out of armament" is something that's supposed to
| happen to other nations, not the US, so its a very hard sell
| politically.
| renewiltord wrote:
| BVR = Beyond Visual Range (37+ km missile)
|
| ADA = Air Defence Artillery (anti-aircraft weapons).
| snarf21 wrote:
| It is the same old thing, they became successful doing X and
| that works great until X isn't the optimal thing. However,
| after 50 years doing the same thing, they are a one trick pony.
|
| Also, the A-10 is one heck of a plane and always my favorite.
| Largest caliber nose cannon and the ability to limp back to
| base on one engine and one rudder is so freaking cool. There is
| a National Guard base nearby and it is so cool watching them do
| flybys on the small mountains.
| bsder wrote:
| > It took a huge number of casualties before high command got
| it that charging into machine guns does not work.
|
| Well, there was a nice posting here (hopefully someone will
| find it) about WWI and that 1) stasis was effectively
| inevitable and 2) you _do_ have to charge the enemy
| occasionally or you can 't maintain your stasis (it prevents
| them from moving their artillery forward).
|
| Edit: Thank you, malcomwhite.
| https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-...
| malcolmwhite wrote:
| > hopefully someone will find it
|
| https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-
| part-...
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| After a large organization is structured, it's objective will
| shift to the survival of the organization itself when the
| original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal
| or external factors ("winning", or a change in the context that
| required the objective in the first place).
|
| I would expect an adage about this to already exist - if it
| doesn't, I'm claiming it. :)
| bartread wrote:
| This very topic is covered in Eric Hoffer's book, "The True
| Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".
|
| He's talking more about religious and political movements
| than companies but, with the way many companies today want
| people to believe in their mission, there are strong
| parallels.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > it's objective will shift to the survival of the
| organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective
| is made irrelevant by internal or external factors
|
| Yes, and also the furtherance of the careers of the top
| people.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Similar to the "Gun Club" (and also in the U.S. in the WWII
| era) was the Bomber Mafia - convinced that lots of long-range
| heavy bombers could win any war:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia
|
| They were profoundly resistant to reality (such as sustained
| "unsustainable" loss rates in un-escorted daytime bomber
| attacks on Germany), or even ideological compromises (such as
| long-range fighter escorts for those bombers)...up to the point
| where the en-mass sacking of mafia members, or massive "de-
| emphasis" of their branch of the armed forces were clear and
| present dangers.
| Marazan wrote:
| The astonishing thing was that the UK had just sustained a
| massive bombing campaign by Germany whixh had veeu obviously
| and singularly failed to break the civilain spirit and make
| the UK sue for peace.
|
| So, obviously, the UK airforce proposed that a massive
| bombing campaign would clearly break the German civilian
| spirit and force Germany to sue for peace.
| starfallg wrote:
| The allied bombing of civilian targets in Germany
| officially never happened. They were 'military' or
| 'industrial' targets. It's commonly understood that they
| were retaliatory as opposed to strategic.
| kashyapc wrote:
| Probably that can be a useful insight in some specific
| circumstances as you describe, but it falls flat as a
| generalization. Allow me a snark: maybe a group of _venture
| capitalists_ (many of whom call themselves "angels") might not
| admit a mistake. But many groups (not as grandiose as the
| military, though) _jolly well_ admit and own up non-trivial
| mistakes.
|
| I participate in several open source projects over 13 years
| now. And as _jancsika_ mentions in this thread, various times I
| 've seen mature groups of contributors and maintainers admit,
| and _articulate_ , really difficult mistakes in public.
| Granted, these are small groups ranging from six to twenty-ish.
| Still, it takes courage and wisdom to do it gracefully.
| vanadium wrote:
| I think what separates the two camps is a _positive
| incentive_ to admit failure, which is where the rarity comes
| in, as highlighted by other posters. If the group 's
| incentive is integrity and trust, or loyalty and retention,
| it makes sense as there's a capital (political, monetary,
| etc.) incentive in doing so.
|
| That's where I think the insight cleanly falls apart and yet
| holds up pretty well for the vast majority of situations.
| Rarely are groups actually _positively incentivized_ to admit
| failure, and therefore they do not, as a cohesive unit,
| actually admit failure as there 's a greater incentive _not
| to_ , barring force.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I might suggest Naval misunderstands what it means to manage
| something (which is funny because he's known for being wildly
| successful at having done so). It's not solving problems, it's
| extracting value from them. The board he was on congratulated
| itself because it had managed, e.g. to continue to extract value
| from whatever cause or dynamic it ostensibly exists to contribute
| money into. It has no interest in _solving_ problems, as then
| what would it exist to manage?
|
| This is very close to the cynicism of those who accuse for-profit
| enterprise as only doing things for money with no care for the
| people their decisions effect, with the slight modification that
| it's not so much the money managerialists do it for as the power
| of continuing to do it, money is just one effect of sustaining a
| dynamic.
|
| Imo, Naval's generalization succumbs to exceptions because it
| misses the above point of what these groups and boards are formed
| to do.
| jameslk wrote:
| > A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never
| admit, "We made a mistake," because a group that tries to change
| its mind falls apart. I'm hard pressed to find examples in
| history of large groups that said, "We thought A, but the
| answer's actually B."
|
| Just because the author can't think of an example doesn't make it
| true.
|
| In fact groups of people, typically businesses, admit failure all
| the time. And it doesn't follow that this causes a "schism"
|
| Isn't Y-Combinator all about failing fast and pivots? Funny to
| see such a silly notion here of all places.
| notJim wrote:
| I think there's also the difference between admitting failure
| and admitting failure _publicly_. Lots of groups will admit
| failure internally, but there 's often not a good reason to
| admit failure publicly, because your adversaries will use it
| against you.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you want to challenge the YC orthodoxy ask if it's worth
| giving up 7%. I know people who chose to do YC and didn't. And
| honestly, the YC-attending guys were steered away from the idea
| that would make them a billion-dollar company. Only when they
| disregarded the YC advice and moved on could they prosper.
|
| EDIT: Sorry, I'm rate-limited here. Yes, I meant that their
| current valuation is $1+ billion. They abandoned the path that
| YC suggested - no success down that road - to get here.
| azinman2 wrote:
| And did they prosper? There's a cosmic sized gap from a
| billion dollar idea and actually obtaining a billion dollars.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Without it the blog post is less interesting. Having listened
| to Naval on Clubhouse he's extremely confident in everything he
| says (/said on Clubhouse, which was largely
| political/covid/government/society/extremely broad categories).
| For people to find you interesting, unfortunately you usually
| need to project such confidence even if it's not technically
| true.
| mccorrinall wrote:
| > Bitcoin doesn't suddenly say, "We should have smart contracts."
|
| Bitcoin _does_ support certain smart contracts, but it just isn't
| trying to be a world VM like ETH and instead tries to emulate
| cash plus a few features.
|
| I agree with the rest though.
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| > Groups Never Admit Failure
|
| I've been a member of groups that admitted failure. One time a
| group of us swam through a barnacle-encrusted passageway & cut
| ourselves. Everyone was bleeding. "That was a mistake," we
| agreed.
|
| A volunteer group I'm in accept a $150k bequest, and after much
| soul-searching we decided to return all but $10k. Everyone agreed
| that we shouldn't have accepted the money in the first place
| because it caused too much strife in our organization.
| whatroot8 wrote:
| Great, let's end nation states as they're forced collectivist
| groups, and they refuse to acknowledge failures.
|
| Wait, not like that?
|
| Blogging is social media. Social media is a pox on humanity.
| "Here's my arbitrary line in the sand! And my Patreon! Cause my
| group can't admit it's failings!"
| jancsika wrote:
| > A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never
| admit, "We made a mistake," because a group that tries to change
| its mind falls apart. I'm hard pressed to find examples in
| history of large groups that said, "We thought A, but the
| answer's actually B."
|
| Is this supposed to be satire?
|
| The Linux kernel mailing list is full of admissions from most of
| the subsystem maintainers talking about past failures. In fact,
| their strongest arguments for avoiding new commits is essentially
| that the changes smell like some of their past failures. Look at
| the kdbus thread. I'm certain I've also seen some ranting about
| untangling code related to CORBA as well.
|
| Frankly, if an organization were more critical of ongoing fuckups
| and failures than the Linux maintainers, you'd have to question
| their core competency.
|
| And Debian! What about the Debian dev who removed entropy from
| their key generator? Again, if Debian had a more egregious
| admission of systemic failure it probably wouldn't exist as a
| distro today.
|
| Even cranks on HN don't attempt a steel man that fucking up the
| GPG key generation somehow _wasn 't_ a failure. Instead, cranks
| speculate about whether some super secret spy was recruited to
| introduce a "subtle" change that would have been laughed out of
| the room if anyone had bothered to directly ask an openssl dev
| about it.
|
| Now let's commence HN cranks attempting to steel man a novel
| argument that two of the most prominently discussed groups on HN
| aren't actually groups.
|
| Edit: also notice that Debian did _not_ fork after the GPG key
| generation /valgrind patch debacle. AFAICT they released a
| statement saying, "All your Base from the past several years
| belong to script kiddies." One could argue that they didn't take
| the right steps to fix their process going forward. But one
| _cannot_ argue that they didn 't admit failure.
| fictionfuture wrote:
| I think you misunderstood his point.
|
| He's making an observation about religious tendencies and
| belief systems within groups.
|
| Debates within the Linux ecosystem aren't fundamental
| challenges to it's ethos
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Usually what happens in that case is a schism_
|
| Pretty sure the "we were wrong" half of the schism is admitting
| failure. This feels like a "no true scotsman" fallacy. There are
| certainly going to be people who never change their minds, but
| there are many, many examples of groups changing their policies
| to the reverse of what they were (slavery, gay marriage,
| outlawing inter-racial marriage, etc). Obviously plenty of people
| disagree with those changes, but OP's view is that the "real"
| group is only the people who never changed their minds.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The body seems to have been written by GPT-3, but the title and
| subheadline are a simple, and probably useful truth.
|
| If an organization is wrong about one of its central tenets, it
| doesn't change that tenet, it splits. This is because if you
| disagree with one of the central tenets of an organization, you
| are no longer an guiding member of that organization. Therefore,
| if an organization of 100 people split because 90 of the people
| realize that the purpose of the organization doesn't make sense,
| now you have an organization of 10 people carefully explaining
| how those 90 never really understood the original purpose, and
| weren't willing to put in the work.
|
| I think that's the process that strengthens groups, When Prophecy
| Fails style. Being wrong is a crucible that leaves the group
| completely composed of members who are only dedicated to the
| group itself, rather than any external object. The slag, who are
| hung up on actually being right, get skimmed off.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
| halayli wrote:
| Anecdotal at best. Never is too strong of a word here. I was
| expecting a study to be accompanied by the article given the
| conviction insinuated in the title.
|
| Groups can come in various shapes and forms but generally they
| often come with a group leader, and that person can play a major
| role in defining success/failure.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Groups never admit failure.
|
| > A group will never admit they were wrong.
|
| I liked this essay, but it seems like they combined these two
| observations together with their example about the non-profit.
| Failure and wrongness are not the same thing.
|
| In their main example, it seems like the company did not admit
| when they had failed at their goals, and the solution to that is
| to measure the goals and be accountable. But they also did not
| question whether those goals were the wrong ones to pursue in the
| first place. Metrics would not improve that, and many for-profit
| companies run into that reality even while improving their KPIs
| quarter over quarter.
|
| I would have liked that distinction to be teased out a little
| more.
|
| In my experience, it's way easier to get a group to admit they
| have failed. Failure, after all, is only temporary, and often a
| reason to raise more funding. What's hard is to get groups to say
| "we need to question if we're working on the right problem",
| because that is an existential threat to the organization itself.
| People will fight hard not to change that: "It is difficult to
| get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his
| not understanding it," etc. etc.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I can't agree more with this post. This brings to mind some
| Milton Friedman quotes:
|
| * Governments never learn. Only people learn.
|
| * One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by
| their intentions rather than their results.
|
| * He moves fastest who moves alone.
|
| * Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends
| his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he
| uses his own...
|
| * It's always so attractive to be able to do good at someone
| else's expense.
| wussboy wrote:
| But governments have improved, and improved radically over the
| years. And the advantages of small groups over individuals are
| so comprehensive they have been a primary source of
| evolutionary progress in humans.
|
| I'm not sure Friedman knew what he was talking about.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > But governments have improved, and improved radically over
| the years.
|
| In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a sizable research
| field devoted to trying to help make human organizations
| function better (it was most of what used to be called
| "operations research", but went far beyond the for-profit
| corporation version of this concept).
|
| For reasons I don't understand, that project appeared to
| almost completely shutdown by the 1980s, and it's hard to
| find much evidence that it ever existed today.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Governments never learn. Only people learn.
|
| Ah, that's why conservatives and capitalists alike want
| corporations classified as people. Otherwise they'd be in the
| class of "never learners" too.
| tehjoker wrote:
| > One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs
| by their intentions rather than their results.
|
| It's useful to remember what Friedman's advice did to Chile
| when he supported the Pinochet regime.
|
| https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-i...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/ma...
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Just to clarify, Milton Friedman most likely did not
| "support" the Pinochet regime. Here is another article on the
| topic:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/07/milton-.
| ..
|
| Nevertheless, Friedman's words stand on their own, and I
| thought that the addition of the quotes worked well with the
| post. I am not making political statements, because I don't
| find them to be appropriate for HN. Peace.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I don't think the claim that he supported Pinochet means he
| had a direct hand in the coup, it's that he attempted to
| re-engineer the Chilean economy after the CIA linked plot
| assassinated the democratically elected socialist president
| who was attempting to socialize parts of the economy. The
| free market reforms were a disaster for the people that
| were only able to be applied under the terms of
| dictatorship.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
| Talanes wrote:
| >* Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he
| spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as
| carefully as he uses his own...
|
| That is definitely not true for me. I actually feel
| responsibility if it's not my money, while I can let myself off
| the hook for any personal indiscretion far too easily.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Friedman was an economist who worked closely with Reagan, if I
| recall correctly, I'm not surprised he also liked to trot out a
| "social security bad" soundbite.
| poetically wrote:
| Just another sermon from the preacher of the market ideology:
|
| > If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way
| to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take
| feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more
| sustainable than non-profit entities. They're self-sustainable.
| You're not out there with a begging bowl all the time.
|
| Profit is the reason we are in this mess. Global warming is
| driven by profits. Destruction of the biosphere is driven by
| profits. Market entities only understand monetary feedback and
| there is no such feedback from the biosphere. It's amazing that
| even when faced with a mountain of evidence that profit motives
| are destroying the habitability of our planet there are still
| people like Naval that never admit they're mistaken. Not only is
| he not admitting his mistake, he seems to be doubling down on a
| doomed ideology.
| closeparen wrote:
| People like meat. People like suburbs. People like air travel.
| Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at
| the ballot box is immaterial (and to be clear, they already do
| in both). Environmental damage is guaranteed by the fact that
| production is connected to desire.
| poetically wrote:
| People seem to like heroin as well. What is your point?
| whatroot8 wrote:
| Not sure why the downvotes.
|
| Addiction to ignoring destructive externalities should be a
| concern.
|
| Industrial behavior is requiring more air conditioning
| which is requiring more industrial behavior.
|
| We tend to think in loops but interlocking rings of an
| infinite number of loops (functions) is a far more
| interesting visual to me.
|
| One little loop over on the bottom may not broadcast info
| such that it reaches a little loop up top after pivoting 90
| degrees. There's a lot of information noise in between.
|
| Put a different energy source in that bottom loops
| coordinates though.
|
| Physics beats social ideology every time. The free market
| is being used to destroy the species, and many people in
| charge believe in the right to force their human death cult
| on us.
|
| Freedom from is being set aside for freedom to.
|
| Eventually the masses will accept moral relativism as they
| have in the past if the options remain constrained to "what
| a minority of wealth holders say." A whole lot of folks
| still live in "story mode" out there.
| smabie wrote:
| What's your point? People do things they like. You can't
| stop them.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| The author states the best way to "change the world to a
| better place" is to work at a for-profit, which is
| reductive and ignores the purpose of the business.
|
| In many cases selling heroin doesn't make the world a
| better place.
| poetically wrote:
| Are you doing heroin right now?
| tangjurine wrote:
| Wait, but don't countries stop people from doing heroin,
| and various other things people don't like?
| dionidium wrote:
| > _Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets
| or at the ballot box is immaterial_
|
| It's not, because when we make decisions with our wallets
| we're forced to weigh personal tradeoffs. No such constraint
| exists for preferences expressed at the ballot box.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
| I'm not saying you're wrong, but these lead to reliably
| repetitive and tedious discussion, which is not on topic for a
| site focused on intellectual curiosity.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| Separately--but related--please don't take HN threads into
| flamewar. You can make your substantive points without snark,
| swipes, or flamebait; on HN, please do so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: also, please don't cross into personal attack. You did
| that repeatedly in the thread below.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Isn't it inconsistent to demand comments refrain from
| ideological claims where a posted article's raison d'etre is
| unsupported ideological argument?
| dang wrote:
| I didn't demand that. This is about comment/thread quality.
| There are certain kinds of post that reliably lead to much
| lower-quality discussion, and those are the kinds we ask
| people to refrain from; generic ideological tangents (and
| generic tangents in general) are a case of this.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Ideology isn't the tangent here, dang, it's the core.
|
| Visit the blog if you're unclear on that.
|
| The problem, dear Brutus^Wdang, lies not in the comments,
| but the post.
| orange8 wrote:
| What is your definition of profit?
| poetically wrote:
| Same as Naval's definition.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires.
| Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills
| human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation,
| industry, and energy in general.
|
| Your argument is not with profit but with human nature, which
| in its infinite ambition always desires more. Removing the
| profit motive is like shooting the messenger, your fundamental
| issue remains unaddressed. Easy evidence for this is that
| communist societies are by no means greener or less rapacious
| than capitalist ones.
| lend000 wrote:
| This really hits the nail on the head. The OP cannot change
| human nature. The most vicious personalities in the business
| world, currently forced to create value (except where already
| able to seek rent from government inefficiency) would instead
| end up as government leaders in his socialist utopia,
| creating less value and no less pollution.
|
| The answer is simply to capture externalities in a market
| economy. For example, I wouldn't outlaw smoking, but I would
| certainly tax the hell out of it to (as precisely as
| possible) counter-act the effects on nearby people. Same for
| any type of pollution -- the tax should be exactly what is
| required to "undo" it. If it cannot be practically undone and
| it is significantly harmful, then it can be banned outright
| (such as dumping of certain poisons and toxins into a water
| supply).
| VictorPath wrote:
| > Your argument is not with profit but with human nature
|
| As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps
| to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth
| century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became
| "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This seems to be rather late?
|
| Long distance trade and traveling merchants date back into
| the Bronze Age at least, and salt was probably traded in
| Europe during the Stone Age.
|
| These transactions did not use money, but their basics do
| not differ much from contemporary trade - including the
| fact that trade centers and highly connected individuals
| could become very, very rich, almost unfathomably so when
| compared to their contemporaries.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Capitalism is the switch from control of land and
| profit/rent earned from land towards control of non-real-
| estate capital and profit/rent earned from capital, simply
| because with the increase of non-land wealth, land became
| relatively a bit less important. The profit motivation has
| been human nature already in ancient Babylon and probably
| as long as homo sapiens has existed.
| brightstep wrote:
| "Profit is human nature" is a fundamental myth of capitalism,
| and obviously untrue considering the many economic systems
| which existed until the last few hundred years.
| poetically wrote:
| This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and
| not with human nature because human nature is malleable.
| People can change their eating habits, they can change their
| transportation habits, they can change institutional
| arrangements that favor profits over well-being, they can
| change the forms of market transactions they find valuable.
|
| This isn't anything deep. These are just basic facts.
| mlyle wrote:
| Grandparent said.
|
| > > Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and
| desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it
| fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat,
| transportation, industry, and energy in general.
|
| Vs.
|
| > My argument is with profits and not with human nature
| because human nature is malleable. People can change their
| eating habits, they can change their transportation habits
|
| To the extent that people change to not demand things that
| cause global warming, providers of such things will not be
| rewarded with profits. So, I don't understand the
| gymnastics to point at a "profit" motive rather than
| intrinsic motivations from this "human nature".
| poetically wrote:
| What exactly in human nature requires profit?
| mlyle wrote:
| No one has said human nature requires profit. You made
| the claim that profit motive, and not human nature was
| behind all these ills; others claim that those ills being
| profitable just represents human nature.
| nawgz wrote:
| > I don't understand the gymnastics
|
| 100 corporations produce 70% of the pollution, this is
| the common mantra right? I don't think there's any
| gymnastics here. It's clear that the unchecked power of
| corporations - structures entirely dedicated to profit -
| has lead to unchecked damages against the environment as
| single men are enabled to take terrible actions and then
| hide (legally speaking) behind the amorphous profit
| entity.
|
| Perhaps this is "human nature" in as much as the nature
| of the most depraved of us is to destroy everything in
| pursuit of self interest, but it's, philosophically
| speaking, an extremely weak and narrow-minded argument
| you make here to imply the modern man is to blame for the
| modern problems, and not those powerful in his society
| mlyle wrote:
| > 100 corporations produce 70% of the pollution, this is
| the common mantra right?
|
| If you don't ascribe any of the pollution to the
| individuals and industries using their products, and only
| to the initial production, sure.
|
| E.g. if you blame the company making the gasoline and not
| the person burning it in their car. Or the company
| shipping goods to consumers, but not the consumer
| ordering and receiving them.
|
| I don't view this as a particularly useful way to view
| things, though.
|
| That is, capitalism is really efficient at delivering on
| what end-customers want. If that ends up being _bad_ in
| some way, well-- the only solution is one of:
|
| * Convince people not to want the thing
|
| * Prevent the thing from causing the harm, by regulation
| or taxing the externality
|
| * Choose a less efficient economic system and hope that
| the problem goes away by being less efficient
| slibhb wrote:
| Far from basic facts. Human nature changes on an
| evolutionary timescale but not otherwise. Cultures change
| rapidly but we don't change them.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| So you believe that you have a way of changing the nature
| of humanity? This seems like the big claim, rather than the
| small one.
| poetically wrote:
| Read what I said instead of projecting what you think I
| said. I did not say anything about changing human nature.
| someguydave wrote:
| you wrote "human nature is malleable"
| dvtrn wrote:
| Saying "I believe humans have the capacity to change
| certain habits" isn't close the same thing as saying "I
| have the means to make people change".
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| So you don't have a solution?
| dvtrn wrote:
| I'm afraid not. The brevity of my prior statements was
| never a suggestion that I had one, so if that's where the
| confusion you have is coming from, my bad.
| poetically wrote:
| That's a fact. If you were born somewhere else you would
| be an entirely different person. You'd be speaking a
| different language, you'd be involved in different social
| arrangements and institutions, and you'd think the axioms
| of your reality were entirely different.
| someguydave wrote:
| Where is your evidence for that claim?
| poetically wrote:
| That you'd be an entirely different person in another
| time and place? That's pretty obvious to anyone that has
| traveled anywhere other than the place they were born.
| someguydave wrote:
| Not at all. For instance, identical twins raised apart
| have remarkably similar IQ test results, personalities,
| and habits.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Human's aren't the only species to do this. Yes, we are doing
| it at a novel scale, but boom/bust cycles of overpopulation are
| common in species that do not participate in a free exchange of
| goods and services.
|
| Deer are a well studied example of a species that will expand
| beyond the ecosystem's natural carrying capacity - followed by
| a season where their population collapses from starvation. But
| deer do not chase profit.
|
| I like to cut humans a bit of slack here. We are the first
| species I know of to identify we are exceeding our ecosystems
| carrying capacity and attempt to modify our own behavior to
| mitigate the looming bust cycle.
|
| The worst thing I can say about humans is that we are
| collectively smart enough to identify we are causing damage to
| the ecosystem on a global scale but - so far - we are not
| collectively smart enough to effectively stop it. Though I
| think in time we will find we can curb this, and we will be
| smart enough to get through whatever damage we cause along the
| way.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The Soviet bloc was not noted for being driven by profit, but
| they still caused lots of environmental devastations. Roving
| bands of hunter-gatherers weren't driven by profit, either, but
| they still hunted a number of North American megafauna to
| extinction.
|
| So I'd say that you are also preaching an ideology - one that
| an objective look at reality shows to be overly simplistic.
| mam4 wrote:
| You speak as if theres anotver reality than profit. There is
| none
| brightstep wrote:
| You sound like someone from the church shouting down a
| heretical scientist.
| poetically wrote:
| Exactly what a devout believer of the market ideology would
| say. The market is a social construction. If you can't
| imagine a different social arrangement then nothing will
| change and the planet will continue to become less and less
| habitable for people.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| It seems the author is conflating a human social proclivity
| toward back-slapping/good-jobs with a reluctance to admit
| failure.
|
| Medium and large groups admit failure all the time, but rarely
| dwell on it. Instead they adjust and evolve, which is the healthy
| response to failure.
|
| Consider changes in management, business pivots, board changes,
| values evolutions, even cultural shifts and generational
| displacement. These are responses to failure after some form of
| prior admission to failure, even if slight.
|
| The shiny thing that happens is declarations of victory and
| praise - so that's where a lot of attention goes and where even
| the author has a bias. Admissions of failure are by their own
| mechanics brief and not very sparkly/shiny/attention-getting.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| It's an interesting premise, but does not support the conclusion
| that for-profit companies are more sustainable than non-profits.
| Like at all.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| there are a lot of funny passages in here, but this one really
| made me laugh:
|
| > If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way
| to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take
| feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more
| sustainable than non-profit entities. They're self-sustainable.
| You're not out there with a begging bowl all the time.
|
| Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great
| examples of for-profit industries that are almost always
| insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out
| there with a begging bowl."
| irchans wrote:
| It's interesting to me that you include the Tech industry. I am
| familiar with bailouts for the auto and financial industry. In
| what way is the Tech industry "insulated from feedback"?
| jseliger wrote:
| _I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving
| out money for a cause, and I found it very disillusioning because
| what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they
| would declare victory. Every project was victorious. Every
| project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping. There
| were a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision
| statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners--but
| nothing ever got done._
|
| This is what most nonprofits, and a surprisingly large number of
| businesses, are like: https://seliger.com/2012/03/25/why-fund-
| organizations-throug.... Some nonprofits mistakenly believe that
| grant evaluations are about evaluating the efficacy of the
| program, rather than declaring victory:
| https://seliger.com/2013/06/02/with-charity-for-all-ken-ster...
| lumost wrote:
| An important corollary is that if you mistakenly attempt to
| rationally evaluate a program when everyone expects
| backslapping... then it's going to come across as a declaration
| of abject failure.
|
| When stakeholders expect victory to look rosy, and instead it
| looks balanced then they'll believe something went wrong.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I accidentally killed a very promising project this way. I
| gave a pitch demonstrating how it could stand up brilliantly
| to multiple avenues of ruthless investigation and criticism.
| People didn't listen to the words, they listened to the
| emotion of the ruthless investigation, and they discarded the
| idea in favor of one which would have tipped over if someone
| had brought a similar magnifying glass to within a mile.
|
| Once I realized that good pitches were about emotions, I
| started getting much better results.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's a very painful moment in everyone's career when they
| realize that, no, they're not the only one that has noticed
| that powerpoints are usually full of fluff, and no, they're
| not going to get anywhere by changing that, because yes,
| they got that way for a reason.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I was on the board of a foundation [ ... ]
|
| I strongly suspect this was a US-based foundation. That
| behavior is not exclusive to the USA, but much, much more
| predominant here. It's almost a stereotype of US (individual
| and corporate) behavior.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Seems like this depends on what you mean by "large group." If
| we're only talking about, say, populations of entire large
| countries, or all adherents to a major world religion, then sure,
| it would be very unlikely to get them to literally all agree that
| some error was made. But that's mostly because it would be
| difficult to coordinate _any_ behavior that specific across that
| large of a group of people. If, however, we 're just talking
| about the official leadership or representatives of some large
| group, then there are plenty of cases of them admitting mistakes.
| Even big companies and governments occasionally admit mistakes.
| dahart wrote:
| > A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never
| admit, "We made a mistake," because a group that tries to change
| its mind falls apart. I'm hard pressed to find examples in
| history of large groups that said, "We thought A, but the
| answer's actually B."
|
| Germany openly regrets Nazis and Hitler. In the US we admit that
| letting McCarthy run amok was a huge mistake. Globally billions
| of people admit that we were wrong to let short term economic
| interests steam-roll the environment for the last century.
|
| This article feels like a "my logical-to-me sounding hypothesis
| must be true because I haven't thought of any counter-examples"
| rationalization. It doesn't examine any cases of groups admitting
| being wrong, and there are lots in history. It doesn't ask the
| question why is a group being wrong is a legitimately harder
| conclusion to come to, even from people external to the group.
| There usually are debates and individuals causing things to go
| one way or another.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| > Germany openly regrets Nazis and Hitler.
|
| If you were looking for the least-subtle example of the
| author's schism theory, i think you found it. :)
|
| Though I get your point - maybe the missing piece is "a schism
| will split the group... but in the very long term, it might be
| healed."
| dahart wrote:
| Not sure I'd agree Germany ever split or experienced a
| schism. It went one way for a while, then another, and the
| group as a whole admits not wanting to repeat it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > In the US we admit that letting McCarthy run amok was a huge
| mistake.
|
| Who is this "we" ? I strongly suspect that a large number of
| those who voted to re-elect the previous president likely
| incline a little bit in McCarthy's favor. He was anti-commie,
| anti-leftie, pro-america, and really a model for some parts of
| contemporary conservatism. Yeah, ok, so a few innocents got
| hurt, but look ... with all those people in front of McCarthy's
| committee ... a bunch of them had to be commies, right? No
| smoke without fire, etc.
| reggieband wrote:
| Reminds me of Kuhn's idea of Paradigm Shift.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
| yboris wrote:
| Counterpoint: _GiveWell_ has a link "Our Mistakes" directly on
| the main navigation bar!
|
| https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes
|
| It's beautiful to see such behavior <3
| danr4 wrote:
| Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
| didibus wrote:
| > But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that
| are for-profit, sustainable and ethical so you can attract the
| best people. You can sustain it because it's a mission and it's
| not just about the money--because there are diminishing returns
| to making money. There's a diminishing marginal utility to the
| money in your life
|
| This is ideological, in practice, just like non-profit fail to be
| profitable, for-profit fail to be ethical.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I'm hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups
| that said, "We thought A, but the answer's actually B."
|
| Being German I would like to think that while there's always
| opportunity to be more introspective about your history over the
| last few generations we've done an okay job of correcting some
| historical mistakes, and that's a pretty decently sized group.
|
| >If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way
| to do it is a for-profit
|
| I can only assume that if we'd turned the country into an LLC
| we'd be even more on the cutting edge of error correcting today.
| I feel like this post is what happens if you burn every history
| book and instead shove a diet of a16z podcasts and silicon valley
| serial entrepreneur biographies through GPT-3
| vt85 wrote:
| The problem is, you were not wrong. What is wrong is what is
| being taught in universities, schools and everywhere. To give
| you an example. Communism killed (proven) at least 100 million
| people. It's incomparable to what you had in mind. Yet no one
| speaks about that. Actually, I am being censored everywhere
| when I even mention it. I will be censored here, too. And
| somehow, the worst of the worst in the world was the force that
| opposed communism. Even Churchill admitted he was on the wrong
| side. As a side note, I don't have anything against Jews, since
| that's the go to argument. Actually, I believe Jews are the
| only ones that are still sane in this world. They don't feel
| ashamed to hate their enemies, neither to defend their own.
| pvg wrote:
| _we 've done an okay job of correcting some historical
| mistakes_
|
| I don't want to take anything from the generally commendable
| and impressive German efforts in that regard, as you say, over
| a period of several generations. At the same time, one has to
| acknowledge to get there, Germany was physically destroyed, its
| territory dismembered and occupied, it effectively ceased to
| exist as a sovereign state for a period, etc, etc. It's not
| much of an example of a group spontaneously deciding they'd got
| it wrong.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, Germany had to be made to do that. We had to remake the
| nation into one that has changed its dogma from "we were right"
| to "we were wrong". The fact that the populace accepted it is
| awesome, actually, but it needed to be done to them.
| [deleted]
| atoav wrote:
| However much I like the German way of dealing with the past, I
| can't shake the suspicion that all of this is not without it's
| incentives.
|
| As someone living in Germany as well, Germans _love_ to tell
| others how things are done. This is only possible if you have
| the moral high ground. Musterschuler an all that.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Apple was forced to admit that its efforts to develop a next
| generation operating system failed so they looked around and
| after considering both BeOS and NeXT Apple bought NeXT and began
| work on what would be called Mac OS X which is what many of you
| used to read this.
| yannoninator wrote:
| > Groups never admit failure.
|
| > A group will never admit they were wrong.
|
| ConstitutionDAO tried to buy the US Constitution. When the
| auction ended there was a large Twitter spaces group that
| mistakenly celebrated CDAO's 'win' in the auction.
|
| However, when it was revealed that CDAO actually lost the bid,
| the Twitter spaces group admitted they were wrong and that CDAO
| failed and then announced it to everyone in the group. [0]
|
| This group admitted failure.
|
| [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxd5z9/chaos-reigns-as-
| const...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change
| their viewpoints. What's ironic is that it appears in a public
| environment in which groups _are_ changing their viewpoints,
| often quite publicly. Many are taking extreme heat for this.
|
| Technical projects and groups are adopting codes of conduct and
| behaviour, changing stances on what had long been accepted.
|
| Companies are similarly changing their views on what types of
| behaviour are considered acceptable amongst both staff and
| leadership.
|
| The high court of the United States just heard a case in which it
| seems highly likely that it will substantially change its
| collective mind over a decision it had made some 50 years ago.
|
| The two major political parties of the United States have, over
| the course of some 60 or so years, virtually completely changed
| their respective stances on racial equality and civil rights. Not
| a fast change, but a profound one.
|
| The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier condemnations
| and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the conviction of
| Galileo.
|
| Scientific bodies and disciplines change their mind, preferably
| based on evidence, _all the time_. It 's what science is. A
| remarkable case was the development of the theory of plate
| tectonics from a radical fringe concept to the central organising
| principle of geology, from 1915 to 1965.
|
| We're in the midst of an onging attempt to change collective
| understanding, and response to the overwhelmingly evident fact of
| anthropogenic global warming as a consequence of fossil fuel use.
|
| Reputable news and media organisations report on their own errors
| and omissions _on an ongoing basis_.
|
| The most durable institutions in the world are _not_ commercial
| entities (the five-year failure rate of new enterprises is about
| 50%). Rather, they are not-for-profit service organisations and
| institutions, typically schools. The oldest universities date
| back over 1,000 years, and there are primary schools dating to
| before the year 1.
|
| And the field of economics has been in the process of admitting
| the failure of free-market absolutism, or even of free markets as
| anything other than a special case, for over 150 years.
|
| Groups are _resistant_ to change, yes, but they are not
| absolutely incapable of it.
|
| Arguing against facts is quite easy where one doesn't bother to
| consult them.
| didibus wrote:
| This could just be about the scope you attach to a group. If
| the composition of the group changes is it still the same
| group?
|
| I feel most of the changes you mentioned saw a churn in the
| members of the groups themselves.
|
| Also, the article mentions changes can happen but not without a
| schism, which I feel most of your examples demonstrate that a
| schism is happening.
| bartread wrote:
| > The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier
| condemnations and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the
| conviction of Galileo.
|
| But nobody changed their minds or admitted a mistake: people
| just died or retired and were replaced by different people who
| thought differently.
|
| The content of the post makes it obvious that it's discussing
| the actions and decisions of groups over much shorter periods
| of time: i.e., within a single human lifetime, and actually
| within quite a small portion of a lifetime, because it's
| talking about outcomes of funded projects and how they're
| viewed.
| arch-ninja wrote:
| The conviction of Galileo is actually pretty funny; it took a
| few decades _after landing on the moon_ for the church to
| apologize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair#Moder
| n_Catholic...
|
| That's some sinful pride right there.
| lodi wrote:
| > The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change
| their viewpoints.
|
| Actually the principal claim is that "a group will never admit
| they were wrong." I think I agree with both claims.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The general domain is group conflict and change. There's a
| literature on that. Naval's failed to acknowledge its
| existence, let alone consult it.
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=7,39&qsp=2&q.
| ..
|
| Changing a change of mind is a subset of admitting error.
| Naval's claim is an absolute ("never"), and a single
| counterexample serves as a sufficient disproof.
|
| I've provided multiple.
| overshadow wrote:
| > This happens in crypto land, too, where the coins fork
|
| You only get hurt when you're holding? Crypto for me was always
| about not using it as a speculative currency, but actually
| /using/ it when you could. There's a thing called /spending/
| which all the wealthy seem to avoid.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Spending? What's that? Crypto is mostly about the speculative
| asset bubble and scams. :)
| timdaub wrote:
| haha so Naval even writes his name first when he starts a blog
| post:
|
| > Naval: Groups never admit failure. A group would...
| catsarebetter wrote:
| I think it depends on how drastically wrong the group is and if
| the which sets of individuals in a group that gets attracted to
| it based on around an idea, mission, value, etc.
|
| Like for example, as soon as meme stocks dive in the next
| recession, most likely the reddit groups based around this will
| fall apart because the idea that meme stocks are a great way to
| make quick money will die.
|
| I think the shape of the group changes, those with more deeply
| held beliefs about a group will stay and perhaps "regroup", but
| for most, who get attracted to a particular group for no clear
| first principles, they will leave and from their perspective, the
| group has definitely died.
|
| But to use the meme stock example above, those who were in the
| group because of deeper beliefs that meme stocks signal a shift
| in retail trading and the rise of the consumer need for financial
| independence early on tied to the lowered barriers of financial
| transactions thanks to the internet, they will regroup.
|
| Ok back to work
| ziggus wrote:
| This a perfect example of what some people have referred to as
| "first-principles thinking". Except in this case, the person
| doing the thinking is an idiot.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I would replace "never" with "rarely." Patagonia is a good
| example of a company that admits failure -- they talk alot in
| their publications about finding ecological, moral, and
| profitability problems with their practices, describing lessons
| learned and attempts to improve.
|
| I have seen in my work that individual tasks present failures as
| successes in their final reviews, and I can't think of any
| examples of a task that admitted "this didn't work out" even
| though many of the projects I'm thinking of are R&D and really
| didn't work out at all.
| Spivak wrote:
| This a good point. I think we can refine the rule to something
| like "groups never admit anything that makes them look bad."
|
| Patagonia can admit failure because they've set it up so that
| failure is a fine outcome and even the attempt is noble.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Exactly. The trick is to create an environment and context
| where it's possible for groups and individuals to brag about
| their failures (+/- mitigation strategies).
| DantesKite wrote:
| I feel the same way about charities. There are some great ones
| out there, but I think it takes a special culture and unique
| circumstances to not eventually be corrupted by bad actors.
|
| I still feel if you want to change the world, one of the best
| ways is to build an ethical business.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-08 23:00 UTC)