I’ve been in several startups that died this way. They were hardware startups; there was a big jump between research tools (relatively cheap, flexible, low throughput, expert-labor-intensive) and limited production tools (10X more expensive, much less flexible, 100X higher throughput, capital intensive). If you buy production tools before your process really works, you lose flexibility to further develop your process. The loss of flexibility is often fatal.
Jay Molstad
Sure they do. If you ask a random stranger “where is the toilet?” or “when does the event begin?”, you will probably get a level 1 answer.
If you are saying that no one operates exclusively on level 1, then I agree with you. I would even agree that communication often happens on multiple levels at once. But level 1 communication definitely happens; we often communicate actual, literal facts. In cases where there isn’t any real emotion involved, like giving directions to strangers, we may operate only on level 1 for a moment.
Legally, there are two reasons (in the US):
1) The Fifth Amendment: No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Quarantine looks very much like imprisonment, and the power to indefinitely imprison without due process is an extremely dangerous one.
2) Negligence is a tort**, not a crime, and torts have to prove damages by a preponderance of the evidence. You can’t successfully sue Bob for giving you COVID unless you can prove it more likely than not that your COVID came from Bob. That’s basically impossible.
** As it should be. People slack off very frequently, and if inconsequential slacking off was criminally punished then civilization would collapse.
I agree with many of your points, but have a few areas of disagreement that lead me to different conclusions:
There is considerable evidence of permanent lung damage, even in cases with no noticeable symptoms.
A one-time ten percent decrease in lung function will barely inconvenience a 20-year old. If the same person gets the same disease every year, (s)he won’t live to 30.
The linked article quotes studies indicating potentially permanent lung damage in 77% to 95% of the test subjects.
The virus is mutating in ways that complicate the development of treatments and vaccines.
Each person infected has a tiny chance of becoming host to a problematic mutation, and passing it on.
The fewer infected people, the less of a problem this will be.
I do not know (at this time) whether we will have a vaccine in a year, or ever. AFAIK we’ve never created a vaccine for a respiratory coronavirus before (we have some veterinary vaccines for intestinal coronaviruses, but not respiratory ones). Some vaccine trials for the related SARS-1 coronavirus made the disease worse, not better.
To me, this adds up to “coronavirus is potentially much more serious than you think, even for young people, and it would be better to be very cautious until the uncertainties are resolved”. I understand that the economy is doing very poorly, but I think the risks, at this time, militate against opening up. I strongly support measures to help those who’ve lost jobs because of the situation, though.
Note: This represents my opinion as of a particular time. As new information comes in, I expect to update my opinion accordingly.
I’ll add that this is a cycle; Stage 5 is Stage 1. People operating in Stage 4 are paying very little attention to objective reality. Accordingly, their objective situation is usually deteriorating; competitors operating at lower levels gradually eat their lunch without them really noticing. The cycle restarts when objective conditions deteriorate to the point that they can no longer be ignored and the complicated games of social signaling are abandoned. To extend Strawperson’s comment:
Level 1: “There’s a lion across the river.” = There’s a lion across the river.
Level 2: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I don’t want to go (or have other people go) across the river.
Level 3: “There’s a lion across the river.” = I’m with the popular kids who are too cool to go across the river.
Level 4: “There’s a lion across the river.” = A firm stance against trans-river expansionism focus grouped well with undecided voters in my constituency.Level 5/Level 1: “There’s a lion right here” = There’s a lion right here (We really should have been paying more attention to the actual lion and focus groups no longer seem important).
Three points:
1) Any risk-benefit calculation should consider that COVID-19 appears to be only minimally harmful to the young and healthy. Deep UV can cause skin cancer at any age, which seems like a good reason to be careful here. Human DNA is not fundamentally different than virus DNA where UV light is concerned.
2) It might be safer in Africa or India where melanin protects the local populations from UV. Yes, that’s what melanin is for.
3) Can we do the same thing, but safer, with a detergent mist?
This is a good name for a concept I’ve encountered in other fields. Consider climate change. {B} is the amount of fossil fuels we burn. {X} is “climate change breaks agriculture beyond repair and billions die”. {Y} is “we do not have enough energy to run civilization as we know it and billions die”. We’re Adam if we can create abundant renewable energy in a short timeframe and also develop effective carbon sequestration technology, and we’re Edgar if we remain dependent on rapidly-depleting fossil fuels.
Some of this seems to be a problem intrinsic to meritocracies. The people who get to positions of real authority in a competitive, meritocratic system have been trained for decades to ignore the losers disappearing in the rearview mirror while using their current position of authority primarily as a platform to push for their next promotion. Those are terrible habits for a society to cultivate in its leaders.
Let’s add 4: America was fighting on two theaters and the USSR was basically fighting on one (which isn’t to deny that their part of the war was by far the bloodiest). Subduing Japan and supporting the nationalists in China (the predecessors to the Taiwanese government) took enormous amounts of US military resources.
I’d downplay #2: WWII had all kinds of superweapon development programs, from the Manhattan Project to bioweapons to the Bat Bomb. The big secret, the secret that mattered, was which one would work. After V-J day the secret was out and any country with a hundred good engineers could build one, including South Africa. To the extent that nuclear nonproliferation works today, it works because isotope enrichment requires unusual equipment and leaves detectable traces that allow timely intervention.
Dishwashers treating restaurant plates like toxic waste is not based on a risk calculation, it’s based on our moral principles regarding purity.
I agree with most of what you’re saying in the post, but this bit strikes me as a bad example. Used dishes are likely to contain significant amounts of saliva, which is the primary transmission vector of the virus. Spraying dishes with water could easily result in a virus-laden aerosol, and infection through small cuts is also a concern. If you handle dishes from hundreds of people a day, the risk starts adding up. Although I agree that surfaces are rarely a significant concern, it seems that a restaurant dishwasher is a worst-case scenario for transmission by surfaces and extra precautions are justified.
It took about 4 years from America going public with the existence of nuclear weapons (Hiroshima) to the first Soviet nuke. If a technology is hugely impactful (so that money is no object) and proof of concept is public knowledge, three years is a really long time.
Your approach is probably appropriate for a software startup, but it’s horrible for a bridge. If your first bridge collapses and kills a bunch of people, your company won’t survive to build bridge 2. Some industries tolerate failure better than others, and a company needs to set its risk tolerances accordingly.
I think part of it is that contracts are mostly interpreted by trained humans. A computer works through each line of code before continuing to the next line. A human can look at a paragraph of standard legal language, understand that it does the standard thing, and move on in a second or so; reading a paragraph of non-standard language makes the human stop and think, which is much slower and often causes anxiety.
Even better, there are usually many court cases establishing exactly how the standard language should be interpreted in a wide variety of circumstances, which makes the standard language much more predictable and reliable. In software terms, it has already been debugged.
There are also financial barriers. Managers generally have mortgages, kids in private school or college, etc. They have debts to pay and mouths to feed.
Your baseline mortality rate implies an average life expectancy of 120 years. I’d double-check that source.
Also, COVID-19 can cause permanent lung damage, and possibly damage to other organs, even if people are otherwise asymptomatic. The possibility that many people, now young and with sufficient lung capacity to ignore the damage, may become disabled in 20 years or so is what worries me most.
I don’t know if maze-nature can be resisted, but the same factors that bring maze-nature also allow economies of scale and desirable types of complexity. All of the armies in WWII had considerable maze-nature, but that doesn’t mean that fielding a smaller army would have worked better. Bigger armies usually win, despite the added levels of (mis)management. And the processes that turn natural materials into an iPhone are necessarily going to take millions of people, because phones are incredibly complex. Sometimes maze-nature may be an acceptable cost to pay, at least for a while.
Your patients seem to have a problem deeper than depression. They seem to be spending their lives doing things that they hate. Taking a pill to hate it less is probably a sub-optimal solution.
Sure. I just thought it was worth drawing a distinction between “level 1 happens, but not always and often commingled with other levels” (which is true) and “level 1 never happens” (which is a one-way ticket to cloudcuckooland, but which many people seem to believe anyway). If you find yourself in a situation where nobody ever operates at level 1, you should leave.
A high maze level makes a fixation on object-level results impractical. Middle management has three defining characteristics:
It’s remote from object-level interactions. It rarely deals with individual customers or particular bits of inventory. Its knowledge of the business process is largely abstract, and its concrete knowledge is often outdated (because it was accumulated before promotion). Object level outcomes (e.g. sales or new products) are not easily attributable to specific middle managers.
It is responsible to upper management, who is even more out of touch on the object level but demands “results” in the form of plausible data that can be spun to the markets as good results. Upper management also demands obedience to its narratives; when upper management tells the market your firm is going big into Fad X, then middle management needs to be seen to support Fad X. (Note 1)
Its staff have object-level information. They often have strong incentives to distort management’s perspective of this information. When accurate information is available, it’s often contrary to middle management’s narrative. E.g. “Fad X? Yeah, we tried that twelve years ago. We could never monetize it.”
If your organization gets big enough to need many layers of management (note 2), these effects will show up.
Note 1- A friend of mine at an Army lab told me that he was once asked by higher management how they would use nanotechnology in infrared sensors. My friend responded that, since infrared photons have micron-sized wavelengths, it didn’t make sense to use nanotechnology. My friend was ordered to use nanotechnology anyway, and one of his experiments was eventually published (billed as an effort to use nanotechnology for this purpose). The experiment had actually been regarded as a failure because it had grown useless nanostructures instead of doing what it was supposed to do.
Note 2- It varies with activity, but generally a good manager can handle about six staff each. Since each six managers need an upper-level manager, you can use the base-6 logarithm of your worker count for a lower bound of the number of levels you need in your hierarchy. Note that this includes all workers in your process, even the work you contract out (contracting generally adds at least one level in practice).
I’ve definitely seen this in the academic literature. And it’s extra annoying if the study used a small sample; the p-values are going to be large simply because the study didn’t collect much evidence.
OTOH, chemotherapy isn’t a very good example because there are other factors at work:
Chemotherapy has serious side effects. There are good reasons to be cautious in using extra.
There are also not-as-good reasons to avoid using extra chemotherapy. Medical care is highly regulated and liability-prone (to varying extents in various areas). In the US, insurers are notoriously reluctant to pay for any treatment they consider unnecessary. Departing from standard practice is likely to be expensive.