Counterpoint: quite a few business owners don’t like employees taking heroic responsibility for things that they want control over.
Very often they don’t understand the broken processes that they nomimally oversee, and if you get something done via heroism in spite of such sadness they won’t spontaneously notice, and won’t reward it, and often won’t even understand that heroism even happened. Also they can easily be annoyed if you try to take credit for “things worked” by saying that they counter-factually would not have worked but for your own special heroism. Your fixing some problem might make them money, but they don’t share the money, or even say thanks… so like… why bother?
Sometimes oligarchic hierarchies even directly object and stop such work in progress! I think in some of these cases this is because you’d have to go sniffing around a bit to figure out who had what formal responsibility and how they were actually using it, and many businesses have quite a bit of graft and corruption and so on. In order to understand what is broken and fix it you might accidentally find crimes, and the criminals don’t like the risk of that happening, and the criminals have power, and they will use it to prevent your heroism from risking their private success. This explains a lot of how the government works too.
I tend to find “heroic responsibility” useful as a concept for explaining and predicting the cases where competence actually occurs, especially cases of supernormal competence… specifically, to predict that it happens almost exactly and only when someone controls the inputs and owns the outputs of some process they care deeply about.
When you find unusual competence, you often find someone who has been unusually abandoned, or left alone, or forced to survive in tragically weird circumstances and then rose to the occasion and gained skills thereby. Often they took responsibility because no one else could or would and because They Cared.
Seven year olds with a mom who is a junkie that never cooks often can cook meals more competently than 25 year old men who have always had a mom or girlfriend or money-for-takeout that produced food for them based on them just asking for it. The near-orphan rises to the demands due to inevitably NEEDING “heroic responsibility” for keeping him or her self fed, and the grown man does not similarly rise because “no need”.
The term co-dependency is another name for the pattern of “virtue genesis from inside of tragedy” but using that phrase narrows the focus towards family situations where someone was “dependent on drugs” and calling what happens a “codependent” result for those near to the broken people deems the resulting strengths as ALSO tragic (rather than deeming the results for those near the drug abused better-because-stronger).
Sociologically, this explains a lot about LW: we tend to have pasts that included “unusually more ‘orphan’ issues” than normies.
But also, very smart people who lack substantial capital or political power often FEEL more orphaned because they look around and see the status quo as a collection of dumpster fires and it makes them sad and makes them want to try to actually fix it. In HP:MoR almost everyone was freaked out by the idea of putting out the stars… but really the stars burning to no end is a HUGE WASTE OF HYDROGEN. We shouldn’t just let it burn pointlessly, and we only allow it now because we, as a species, are weak and stupid. In the deep future we will regret the waste.
Counterpoint: quite a few business owners don’t like employees taking heroic responsibility for things that they want control over.
Very often they don’t understand the broken processes that they nomimally oversee, and if you get something done via heroism in spite of such sadness they won’t spontaneously notice, and won’t reward it, and often won’t even understand that heroism even happened. Also they can easily be annoyed if you try to take credit for “things worked” by saying that they counter-factually would not have worked but for your own special heroism. Your fixing some problem might make them money, but they don’t share the money, or even say thanks… so like… why bother?
Sometimes oligarchic hierarchies even directly object and stop such work in progress! I think in some of these cases this is because you’d have to go sniffing around a bit to figure out who had what formal responsibility and how they were actually using it, and many businesses have quite a bit of graft and corruption and so on. In order to understand what is broken and fix it you might accidentally find crimes, and the criminals don’t like the risk of that happening, and the criminals have power, and they will use it to prevent your heroism from risking their private success. This explains a lot of how the government works too.
I tend to find “heroic responsibility” useful as a concept for explaining and predicting the cases where competence actually occurs, especially cases of supernormal competence… specifically, to predict that it happens almost exactly and only when someone controls the inputs and owns the outputs of some process they care deeply about.
When you find unusual competence, you often find someone who has been unusually abandoned, or left alone, or forced to survive in tragically weird circumstances and then rose to the occasion and gained skills thereby. Often they took responsibility because no one else could or would and because They Cared.
Seven year olds with a mom who is a junkie that never cooks often can cook meals more competently than 25 year old men who have always had a mom or girlfriend or money-for-takeout that produced food for them based on them just asking for it. The near-orphan rises to the demands due to inevitably NEEDING “heroic responsibility” for keeping him or her self fed, and the grown man does not similarly rise because “no need”.
The term co-dependency is another name for the pattern of “virtue genesis from inside of tragedy” but using that phrase narrows the focus towards family situations where someone was “dependent on drugs” and calling what happens a “codependent” result for those near to the broken people deems the resulting strengths as ALSO tragic (rather than deeming the results for those near the drug abused better-because-stronger).
Sociologically, this explains a lot about LW: we tend to have pasts that included “unusually more ‘orphan’ issues” than normies.
But also, very smart people who lack substantial capital or political power often FEEL more orphaned because they look around and see the status quo as a collection of dumpster fires and it makes them sad and makes them want to try to actually fix it. In HP:MoR almost everyone was freaked out by the idea of putting out the stars… but really the stars burning to no end is a HUGE WASTE OF HYDROGEN. We shouldn’t just let it burn pointlessly, and we only allow it now because we, as a species, are weak and stupid. In the deep future we will regret the waste.