Tl;dr I encourage people who changed their behavior based on this post or the larger sequence to comment with their stories.
I had already switched to freelance work for reasons overlapping although not synonymous with moral mazes when I learned the concept, and since then the concept has altered how I approach freelance gigs. So I’m in general very on board with the concept.
But as I read this, I thought about my friend Jessica, who’s a manager at a Fortune 500 company. Jessica is principled and has put serious (but not overwhelming) effort into enacting those principles, to good results (I think), both serious ongoing volunteer efforts and “call your local councilman” type stuff. She is the kind of person who in a smaller town could achieve “pillar of the community”, but probably not hero status. She has a nice life, but she also gives back, far more than the average American. She also, in her own words, “will not work for any company without an HR department.” She likes the bureaucracy of large companies, it makes her feel safer. Often her role in her volunteer work is being an interface between people with lofty principles but no plan and the soul-sucking bureaucracies who can implement but have no morality, and while I mostly have her own assessments on this it seems like it does seem like she’s helping.
I don’t see any good coming from giving Jessica this post. I think she’d get defensive and angry and it would make it harder for me to discuss the concept with her in a useful way. Which is fine, if we insisted every post be completely harmless to every single person we’d never get anything done, and it’s fine that this post was aimed at people with a shorter inferential distance.
I also don’t think it inspired any behavior change in me. But maybe in my case the inferential distance was too short, and there was nothing more to convince me of (although I don’t agree with all of it).
But having ~ruled out both ends of the bell curve, I’m wondering what the range is of people this post is convincing to, in the sense of contributing to a change in decisions. I would love to hear from people who found this post or sequence influential, where you started from, where you ended up, and how you feel about it now. And of course I’m also interested in evidence from the far ends of the distribution, especially if contradicts my data points.
Tl;dr I encourage people who changed their behavior based on this post or the larger sequence to comment with their stories.
I had already switched to freelance work for reasons overlapping although not synonymous with moral mazes when I learned the concept, and since then the concept has altered how I approach freelance gigs. So I’m in general very on board with the concept.
But as I read this, I thought about my friend Jessica, who’s a manager at a Fortune 500 company. Jessica is principled and has put serious (but not overwhelming) effort into enacting those principles, to good results (I think), both serious ongoing volunteer efforts and “call your local councilman” type stuff. She is the kind of person who in a smaller town could achieve “pillar of the community”, but probably not hero status. She has a nice life, but she also gives back, far more than the average American. She also, in her own words, “will not work for any company without an HR department.” She likes the bureaucracy of large companies, it makes her feel safer. Often her role in her volunteer work is being an interface between people with lofty principles but no plan and the soul-sucking bureaucracies who can implement but have no morality, and while I mostly have her own assessments on this it seems like it does seem like she’s helping.
I don’t see any good coming from giving Jessica this post. I think she’d get defensive and angry and it would make it harder for me to discuss the concept with her in a useful way. Which is fine, if we insisted every post be completely harmless to every single person we’d never get anything done, and it’s fine that this post was aimed at people with a shorter inferential distance.
I also don’t think it inspired any behavior change in me. But maybe in my case the inferential distance was too short, and there was nothing more to convince me of (although I don’t agree with all of it).
But having ~ruled out both ends of the bell curve, I’m wondering what the range is of people this post is convincing to, in the sense of contributing to a change in decisions. I would love to hear from people who found this post or sequence influential, where you started from, where you ended up, and how you feel about it now. And of course I’m also interested in evidence from the far ends of the distribution, especially if contradicts my data points.