ErickBall

• ErickBall 10 Jan 2019 22:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: Book Recom­men­da­tions: An Every­one Cul­ture and Mo­ral Mazes

  The con­cepts dis­cussed here re­mind me of a book I read re­cently called “The Cure: En­ter­prise Medicine for Busi­ness”. It’s in the for­mat of a novel, from the per­sec­tives of sev­eral differ­ent char­ac­ters in­volved in a busi­ness that makes (un­speci­fied) wid­gets, and I found it to be a page-turner. I think us­ing a fic­tional ex­am­ple helps to make a lot of things ex­plicit that would oth­er­wise be kind of vague, or where the au­thor might as­sume the reader knows what they’re talk­ing about, and the first half gives some great in­sight into what a poorly-func­tion­ing com­pany can look like.

  The cen­tral recom­men­da­tion is similar to what you de­scribe from An Every­one Cul­ture, ex­cept that the em­pha­sis on rad­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion doesn’t in­clude per­sonal stuff. The main “trick” it gives for mak­ing the whole or­ga­ni­za­tion work is that the top man­age­ment has to buy in to the ex­treme-hon­esty com­pany-first men­tal­ity and then con­tinu­ally force it on ev­ery­one else un­til it’s uni­ver­sally ac­cepted, with spe­cial at­ten­tion to dis­cov­er­ing and re­mov­ing any stub­born man­ager who wants to pro­tect their own turf or play power games. It claims to be based on the fa­mously effec­tive man­age­ment sys­tem that GE used. Hav­ing lit­tle ex­pe­rience of cor­po­ra­tions my­self, I can’t say whether it’s a re­al­is­tic ap­proach, but the whole thing struck me as a lit­tle too neat and tidy—if it were that easy, wouldn’t ev­ery­body be do­ing it already?

• ErickBall 10 Jan 2019 22:15 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Grothor's comment on: What are ques­tions?

  I found this as­pect of the topic par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing be­cause it elu­ci­dates the main re­quire­ment of a ques­tion, which I’d never thought of be­fore: a the­ory of mind.

  My cats ask me for food all the time… but this isn’t re­ally a ques­tion, it’s a de­mand. Similarly, when they seek out in­for­ma­tion, it’s always a soli­tary en­deavor. The clos­est they might come to an in­ter­ac­tion with a hu­man (or an­other cat) speci­fi­cally for the pur­pose of gain­ing in­for­ma­tion, would be ap­proach­ing or me­ow­ing with the pre­sumed in­ten­tion of pro­vok­ing a re­ac­tion that illus­trates the other’s mood. Even then it’s more like “try it and see what hap­pens” rather than a co­op­er­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I don’t think they can con­ceive of an­other en­tity pos­sess­ing in­for­ma­tion and be­ing ca­pa­ble of shar­ing it.

  Would love to hear of any coun­terex­am­ples, though.

• ErickBall 6 Dec 2018 18:03 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Tran­shu­man­ism as Sim­plified Humanism

  Could you ex­plain what you mean by re­source al­lo­ca­tion? Cer­tainly there’s a lot of poli­ti­cal and pub­lic opinion re­sis­tance to any new tech­nol­ogy that would help the rich and not the poor. I think that stems from the thought that it will provide even more in­cen­tive for the rich to in­crease in­equal­ity (a view to which I’m sym­pa­thetic), but I don’t see how it would im­ply that only the dis­tri­bu­tion of wealth is im­por­tant...