he fact companies are being run by people with a business background instead of domain experience.
This. One of the things in common* between all the times I've gotten sick of an employer - which has happened with all of my private sector employers in the last decade - has been that it happened when I reached the point that I had stopped reporting to another engineer (current or former) and started reporting to a management type who came from a business background and not a technical one. They and I have universally had such different priorities that we found it frustrating to try to communicate with one another.
* Other than myself, of course, an equally likely root of the problem.
It's funny that once all the really expert or scientific skills were made into credentialed disciplines (starting around 1850 I think), new disciplines were invented which were lacking much specific content: management, education, journalism. Journalists don't understand what's going on but know how to report it (cue DeLong, Baker, Somerby, et al). Teachers wing it on subject matter but "know how to teach". Managers don't know what their company does, but they know how to manage it.
The extreme cases aren't necessarily typical, but they're far too common.
One of the things that frustrates me about working with physicists is that they tend to underestimate the importance of getting the engineering right. I've had multiple hour long arguments trying to get people to do a simple Failure Modes and Effects Analysis only to lose the argument, followed a few months later by having to take the experiment off line for weeks in order to fix some easily foreseeable problem that could easily have been prevented by simple changes in the device design. As I write this I'm waiting to begin postmortem analysis on a leaky O-ring seal that should never have been a problem - O-ring seal design is thoroughly understood and you can simply look up the necessary numbers and geometry in tables available online. But no, O-ring seals are obviously simple so we can just cobble something together based on intuition and save a half hour of design time. We've now been off line for two days, and we'll be lucky to get things running again before Friday.
On the plus side, it frees up time for commenting on blogs, so at least there's that.
2: So what's the fix? Credentialing at least assures you that the person knows the credential-relevant subject matter at some level. Apart from perhaps modifying the credentialing process (review from outside the discipline perhaps?) I don't see a good way to avoid situations like Joe The Plumber setting himself up as an authority on subjects he can barely pronounce let alone understand and being taken as seriously as people who know their ass from a hole in the ground. Fortunately, due to the credentialing process that would never happen.
Careful, guys, or D^2 will be all up in our business about how MBAs really are invaluable.
they tend to underestimate the importance of getting the engineering right
Everybody underestimates getting the engineering right. That's because it costs money and no one wants to admit they aren't going to get it right the first time.
max
['Sigh.']
It's funny that once all the really expert or scientific skills were made into credentialed disciplines (starting around 1850 I think), new disciplines were invented which were lacking much specific content: management, education, journalism.
This is, historically speaking, complete rubbish.
I didn't find this post to be too much information.
I think that credentialing has done as much harm as good in education and journalism. Fo example, many journalists seem to think of "shape of the moon: opinions defer" he-said / she-said journalism as a professional obligation, not as incompetence.
Likewise, education degrees draw less-curious students with immediate material goals, while freezing out people who chose a subject-matter field. (Don't want to overtstate the case, but there's a lot of truth in that.)
My opinion is that you're always going to have the generalist, humanist, common-sense level, in politics, management, journalism, etc., and you shouldn't try to pretend that there's a specialized expertise for that. It's just the area where everything comes together.
Dsquared claims that an expert management science could be extracted from econ, finance, the MBA, etc., even though the present version is sort of a mess. My feeling that it will always slop over into the humanistic, common sense, ideological, untheorized, non-algorithmic zone, and rather than invent a fake science of that, you should just develop your worldly wisdom.
Elucidate, AJ. Universities only started having departments around 1850. Before that you had Law, Classics, and a few others, all of them pretty miscellaneous hodge-podges. Social sciences atarted to appear around 1900. The invention of fake specializations like journalism and education is mostly American, I think, and post-WWII.
1: My experience on this has been mixed. Seen it go bad both ways. But the worst have been engineers/techies in people and/or budget management jobs who did not internalize (or actively resisted) that that was now part of their job. But the cockups in those cases were so massively evident so quickly (and the ultimate fault really accruing to the person that put them in that role) that it got cleaned up in relatively short order. The clueless business types are much better at creating the perception of competence until some TMI event (scaled appropriately) comes along.
But simple Dilbertism is too simple of an analysis.
MDs are famous for being horrible managers. Even the personally-nice ones.
In Ca, at least, hs teachers need a subject certificate as well as a credential. And knowing how to teach isn't to be sneezed at.
12: And complex Dilbertism is too complex. What to do?
My own education certificate (in ESL) didn't even teach me how to teach. The classes specific to the certificate were unbearably awful and not hands-on at all.
Everybody underestimates getting the engineering right. That's because it costs money and no one wants to admit they aren't going to get it right the first time.
IME, it swings between two extremes: management who think it's crazy to pay for engineers if they're going to need time to think about things and management who are so intimidated by the task of understanding the process that they manage that they stay as far away from it as possible and give their engineers so much free reign that there are zero checks and someone gets cocky or sloppy or forgetful and something blows up. In my ideal work environment, my manager would be sufficiently experienced with both management and our product to ask me a few questions about what I'm doing, half to take the temperature of my competence and half to give me the chance to remember something by the act of explaining how it works.
In the job I'm about to leave, there is a Massive Product X which is our chief cash cow. It's a managed service on a specific platform that's been in place, more or less as-is, for nearly ten years. The hardware is beyond aged. Software hasn't been updated as it needed to be. The managed service has been woefully oversold. The amount of activity happening on the platform far exceeds what was intended. The same guy has been taking care of it the entire time. He's never pushed to have it redesigned because then he'd have to explain to his managers that his initial design was inadequate and if it got completely redesigned he might be out of a job anyway. His managers have zero understanding of how it works and react with frustration and anger to the idea that it isn't working. No client is exactly happy with it, so there are a lot of complaints.
My role is to interact with it periodically to make relatively minor updates to its configuration, which I do, but which occasionally uncovers some fault line in the overall product that hints at a future meltdown. One of the reasons I left Ma Bell to go to a tiny company was so that in situations like this I could exert some pressure on the wheel that steers the ship but instead I've come to be seen as a troublemaker for pointing out problems like this. I'm leaving for greener pastures, which is excellent, but in the process I've learned that I am simply the latest in a long line of engineers who have been through the same rock tumbler and who all left, too.
If some manager, at some point, had said, "OK, walk me through how this works," and then asked, "And will it work in ten years with ten times as many customers?" then this could have been avoided. The guy who designed and now cares for it is by no measure unintelligent. He designed it very well to meet the needs of ten years ago. He didn't think to build any scalability in. Someone said to him, "Go build me a system to do X," and he did, and they forgot to think about down the road, around the curve.
Now it's going to be put in the hands of some folks who don't have the technical expertise to notice the fault lines. I can't help but feel like that's an intentional shift, that management is tired of knowing that a major meltdown is coming so they're going to make sure no one can tell them. What do they care, anyway? The company is being bought out by inches as founders slip away and their seats get bought by investment firms who care little beyond making sure there are no "unnecessary" investments in infrastructure this quarter. No one wants to know anything other than will the system be there tomorrow morning; next year is beyond the next several horizons.
But simple Dilbertism is too simple of an analysis.
I agree, it's always more complex than mere PHB's making crazy demands. As a general classification of many different-in-details problems, though, that's a useful one.
I have been very impressed with my first-grade son's teachers. I've mostly mastered the first-grade curriculum, but if I were put in charge of a class, I'm pretty sure I'd benefit significantly from training.
With journalists, I think the correct gripe is with the content of the academic discipline, not with the existence of it. (I think this is PGD's position on economics, and I think it's a view that's even more applicable there.)
I'd characterize the Simple Dilbertian view as: Managers and employees care as little about quality as they can get away with.
Now I suppose that's not universally true, but it's a principle with wide application.
Scott Adams has milked a one-joke schtick more productively than I would have thought possible. (Stephen Colbert, too.)
13, 16: Didn't we just go over this a few weeks back? Pedagogy is a real thing that can be codified and taught, but it seems that, as a whole, teaching colleges aren't good at/focused on doing so.
I believe that Emerson's premise is that the IRL dynamics of making teaching into a "discipline" lead inevitably to this condition - that (as a general rule) J-schools could but don't teach good reportage, that business schools could but don't teach useful management practices, and that teaching schools could but don't teach effective pedagogy.
I can see his argument, and the dynamic that would lead to this situation, but am not wholly convinced.
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Remember the student who can't simplify (1)^n, even after being confronted by it three times in a row, and being shown the first two times?
1) I did have the humility to feel chagrined when I saw her in class the next day, for making fun of her behind her back on the interwebs.
2) She wants to get certified to teach math/sclence at the 4-8 level. (She claimed that she needs through Calc III to do so. IIRC, she's mixed up on this, but she does need Calc I and 2.)
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I'll say this: architecture is arguably part of the lump that JE has identified as fake-disciplines - architects used to be either self-taught gentlemen or, as the name suggests, master builders who had essentially graduated from tradesman to director-of-trades. Credentialism gradually crept in (FLWright had 1 or 2 semesters at engineering school, but some of his peers had an arch. degree from MIT), and now you can't become an architect without a relevant degree.
In the course of this, schools have developed teaching various things. Some focus on practice (U Cinci is famous for their co-op programs that put students on construction sites as well as in offices), others on theory (it's not clear to me that Columbia students actually know how buildings are built IRL).
Point being, it's fairly clear that there is a real body of architectural knowledge, and that there are specific skillsets that architects should have; it's far from clear to me that architecture schools, as a general rule, focus primarily on communicating these to their students. I see a lot of tension among theory people, practice people, tech people, historians, etc. And from that vantage point I can easily see how it is that J-schools, frex, are bad at teaching people to be journalists.
Part of the problem, as I'm sure has been hashed through before, is that professors are, more or less by definition, theorists isolated from real world practices. In the sciences, academics are engaged in exactly the sort of things that all scientists do; whereas, by definition, architecture professors* do not practice architecture. I'm not sure how, say, engineering gets around this problem - do civ-e profs write journal articles about freebody diagrams? I have no idea what, beyond material science-type stuff, a civil or structural engineer would do as ongoing academic research.
* The reality is that most courses IME are taught by adjuncts who are practicing professionals, but I think this is less true in grad programs, and that is the direction the field is moving.
If some manager, at some point, had said, "OK, walk me through how this works," and then asked, "And will it work in ten years with ten times as many customers?" then this could have been avoided. The guy who designed and now cares for it is by no measure unintelligent. He designed it very well to meet the needs of ten years ago. He didn't think to build any scalability in. Someone said to him, "Go build me a system to do X," and he did, and they forgot to think about down the road, around the curve.
I now work with a couple friends developing and supporting a database-backed web application, after coming out of a couple corporate jobs. What has been eye-opening for me is going through more of the process of, well, cost-benefit analysis. Many of the things we do don't even really have to last a year, so in those cases it doesn't pay to polish out the bugs before we let the client have access to the new features. Our clients are, in fact, often best served by us cranking out sloppy code that won't scale well. The flip side of this is that on a couple occasions we've had to go to them and tell them that what we originally developed was, well, crap, and that the fix is going to be expensive, but arguably we've cost them much less money in total than we would have if we'd spent the time to do everything right the first time.
The face-saving option for your guy is to point out that what he developed was a cost-effective solution at the time and has worked well for ten years (or whatever value of N) and that it might be time to develop version 2.0.
Im not an expert on ed teaching. But in general when disciplines become autonomous and self-policing they can go off on tangents. There seems to be a hierarchy with education theorists and reformers having the advantage over hands-on teachers. Practical fields often seem to draw students who budget for minimum cost and effort.
My sister, a teacher, emphatically denies that content knowledge is required. You just read one chapter ahead in the teacher's manual. A fairly high proportion of teachers are teaching out of their specialization.
Against all that, my son had one excellent English teacher, two or three excellent science teachers, and a really excellent chorus director in HS.
Is law also a "fake discipline"? Most law schools could certainly benefit from a major refocusing of their curricula, but though I wouldn't advocate for their abolition. But this might be a general complaint--is there a professional field whose curriculum doesn't need some revamping?
Dsquared claims that an expert management science could be extracted from econ, finance, the MBA, etc., even though the present version is sort of a mess. My feeling that it will always slop over into the humanistic, common sense, ideological, untheorized, non-algorithmic zone, and rather than invent a fake science of that, you should just develop your worldly wisdom.
The fact that worldly wisdom cannot really be packaged into something that looks like technical instrumentalist science has led to a lot of perversion of educational and credential-type stuff, perhaps of knowledge production in general. (Part of this may also be that the pace of technical change is so rapid that the wisdom of one generation may not translate to another). This offers a nice connection to Emerson's analytic philosophy obsession, since analytic phil totally drove the wisdom tradition out of philosophy.
On the other hand, worldly wisdom might always end up in Polonius-type vapidity. I guess our counterpart of worldly wisdom might be the autobiography of the incredibly self-absorbed and arrogant business figure, like Trump! or Chainsaw Al Dunlop or that GE guy. We've completely perverted wisdom into success.
But I'm also great at over-engineering things. I was hired a few years ago to work at a company between its second and third rounds of venture capital (and when the backers balked at the third round and gave them only bridge financing, I got laid off right around the time they went back to beg again). Their product was to be an enterprise-class $buzzword, and I noticed a few glaring security holes in the way the $buzzword was implemented. It could be snooped on the wire, and there were no verifications or authentications in place on the processes that could, um, take down the enterprise customers' $important-systems. The whole thing was hideously designed by a chief architect who was way over his head, and there was one coder who probably should have been hired as chief architect instead but instead had just been made a lead developer. I'd get into arguments with him over the particulars of how to make the $buzzword not suck (and not open us up to lawsuits later), and once he and I came to some sort of compromise that would work and that we could bang together quickly enough, we'd go to the chief architect with both the observed problem and the graceful solution.
And then the chief architect would realize that changing the things we were changing would expose flaws in his design to the people who paid his salary, so for the most part he'd choose to ignore the flaws.
I didn't mind getting laid off.
Worldly wisdom is sort of a last report, and no two wise men agree, and they're all wrong pretty often, and so on. The problem is that it's a formally necessary part of our understanding of reality, and without something good you'll end up using crap like futurology, self-help, Ayn Rand, etc.
Remember the student who can't simplify (1)^n, even after being confronted by it three times in a row, and being shown the first two times?
ummm, I'm probably going to reveal my ignorance here, but isn't 1^n just 1? And -1 ^ n just 1 or -1 depending on whether n is odd or even? How can they be simplified?
"Last resort". IE, you don't use worldly wisdom if you have a science or technique that works. But you never have a technique for everything you need.
But what we have now are hundreds of often-competing categories of limited experts who shoot out their limited results on specific topics, and a lot of overburdened citizens and political leaders and managers and hands-on on-site people winging it as best they can.
but isn't 1^n just 1
Yes, that's the whole simplification. She would stare and stare and say "I don't know how to start this problem." (She was taking the absolute value of an alternating series. So there had been a (-1)^n, and she'd correctly change it to a 1^n and get stuck. Again and again and again.)
31: This probably wouldn't happen if you'd been trained as a teacher.
Why does one need Calc II to teach math at a 4-8 level? It seems valuable to me, so you'll better understand the motivations, applications and implications of what you're teaching, but I'm a little suprised it's a requirement. I thought ED programs were supposed to be fluffy?
The clueless business types are much better at creating the perception of competence
Boy, is this true.
the perception of competence
That's because this is taught in b-school. It's called "leadership." (Not a joke.)
Why does one need Calc II to teach math at a 4-8 level?
I basically agree - a student who absolutely can't pass Calc II could still be a perfectly competent 6th grade science teacher. I think the de facto compromise is that they think it's reasonable if you pass with a D or retake the class more than once.
The real argument for me, though, is that many of these kids don't learn algebra until they take calculus. That's the first setting where it's in their best interest to simplify a polynomial or rational function, before proceeding with the problem. They learn the algebra and middle-school math on a much deeper level when they apply it to higher level math they don't really need.
31: This probably wouldn't happen if you'd been trained as a teacher.
I'm trained in not guffawing in her face. But I learned that one on the job.
Huh. I know that Cringely/Stephens have a weird and not quite solid biography; from what I though I knew about his biography his working for the Carter admin in the late 70s seems a bit surprising. It seems Mark Stephens's book "Three Mile Island" is not only out of print but practically unsearchable on Google Books; it does exist. Too bad---it seems like it could be fascinating reading, especially for an engineering seminar. (One of the best classes I took at Cal was a freshman engineering seminar that focused on how big mistakes got made in various fields--made me realize I didn't want to be an engineer, but was just generally instructive too. The user interface thing reminds me of the common diagnosis that the disaster Challenger partially originated with bad data visualization.)
Bookfinder.com is the first place to go for hard-to-find books.
They learn the algebra and middle-school math on a much deeper level when they apply it to higher level math they don't really need.
Right. I think it's often the case that you don't really, truly learn something until you have to use it as the routine basics for a more complex operation. Another way of putting it is that you can't learn something deeply when it is the most complex thing you know, when you're out on your personal frontier dealing with it.
The famous collapsing "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a state-of-the-art bridge built by a top architect. He was pushing the envelope. There's also a contrary tradition of self-taught, unlicensed engineers who build incredibly overdeterminedly safe bridges because they don't want to get caught.
You can't quite generalize from this, but there's a point there.
One of the best classes I took at Cal was a freshman engineering seminar that focused on how big mistakes got made in various fields
I got a copy of Mario Salvadori's Why Buildings Stand Up when I was in junior high school and thinking I wanted to become an architect. I found it fascinating, but apparently his mother-in-law had a different reaction upon receipt of the first copy: "This is nice, but I would be much more interested in reading why they fall down." She wasn't alone, hence the followup book, which came out while I was actually majoring in architecture.
The Tufte thing on the Challenger disaster is a real eye-opener. His "one day course" (probably coming soon enough to a metropolitan area near you) suffers a bit from being a big commercial for himself, but when he gets going on Challenger, hoo boy.
"That's the first setting where it's in their best interest to simplify a polynomial or rational function, before proceeding with the problem."
Er, they really ought to be able to deal with polynomials of order 2---recognize them, plot them, solve for their roots, see how different coefficients make them change faster or slower, etc.--in order to do any kind of quantitative work with projectile motion. Most conceptual physics classes are built on projectile motion; many good inquiry-based high school science classes (the ones that really want kids to learn how to think, how to work with their hands, and how to connect their physical reality with abstract ideas about it) are based on a freshman physics class.
Most importantly, being able to solve an equation for an unknown, when the equation takes the form [(a/b) = c] (and you're given two of (a,b,c) and need to find the third) takes a lot of comfort with algebraic manipulations. While the old joke about Ohm's Three Laws is both amusing and instructive, a student who doesn't have some ability to look at an equation and figure out if they can solve for the unknown is going to be really lost in chemistry. And while knowing chemistry itself may not be the most necessary thing in their life[I would argue it is], it is a stand-in for many other sorts of quantitative reasoning that they might use one day in, say, econ or poli sci. (Disciplines which, frustratingly enough, have no quantitiative incarnation in the high school curriculum, even the college prep curriculum. As a result, save-the-world types don't realize how useful math is and math-types don't realize how good they might be at saving the world. Even when embodied in the same person.)
I especially appreciate that it reinforces my belief that one of the reasons business is increasingly troubled is because of the fetishization of MBA culture and the fact companies are being run by people with a business background instead of domain experience.
Your belief might or might not be true, but I am baffled that you or the author of the blog post could conclude this from the lessons of Three Mile Island. It simply doesn't square with the facts.
1. to locate the "fetishization of the MBA culture" in the 1970s is an anachronism. At the time of the 3MI accident, the U.S. was producing fewer than 50,000 MBA's per annum (compared to more than three times that today; also, the proportion of MBA's as a % of all advanced degrees has more than doubled in the same period). The essential trappings of the MBA culture--the desktop spreadsheet program, the leveraged buyout--were still several years in the future.
2. Regulated public utilities, of which GPU was one, are and were notoriously immune to the MBA culture. Their regulated rates of return gave them an incentive to estimate their investment requirements generously, which is one of the reasons they were able to invest in nuclear plants in the first place.
3. The specific causes of the 3MI accident were some combination of poor engineering and human error. Could pennywise beancounters have borne some culpability for the accident? Perhaps, but neither Becks nor the author of the blog post offers any evidence.
The premise of the post is fundamentally mistaken.
I thought ED programs were supposed to be fluffy?
When I was still trying to become a middle school math teacher in NC, I flunked out/gave up on the curriculum when I had reached the point of high-end classes titled Group Motion Theory, a complicated name I was told meant "why addition works", a class which involved essay answers to math questions. The thinking at the time was that a teacher with genuine depth in their subject matter is able to engage students more by way of examples of the subject's use in later/other applications.
My pedagogy classes were largely child psych and not really about how to teach, but they were interesting and they taught us a lot of the management techniques - preparing materials, planning for time, etc. - that are doubtless important.
43: Did you miss the part about this being a student who wants to be certified for grades 4-8?
39: BF is awesome, it's true; the founder is a friend of mine. But I don't want to necessarily buy this book, I just want to read the about-the-author information or possibly browse it. It is, however, at my local University library so if I remember it next I'm there, I may browse it then.
a state-of-the-art bridge built by a top architect
Don't lump us in with careless engineers, buddy.
I didn't mind getting laid off.
Gods but that sounds familiar. An example of the mentality currently in place here is that clients are supposed to get detailed reports on their network activity including IDS/IPS alerts. The code meant to read the logs from the sensors has never worked and everyone who's tried to fix it has failed. Eventually a management type, tired of being told that they needed to hire a real programmer to do this, simply pointed at someone whose nickname was "D," as in the letter, and said, "You, put something, anything in that will tell them there have been some number of alerts logged." That's now referred to as "the D special," since he changed the reporting mechanism to use a random number generator that produces too large a range of numbers so some podunk, low-traffic client occasionally sees tens of millions of alerts in their report for, say, a day (then calls us, freaking out).
As I write this I'm waiting to begin postmortem analysis on a leaky O-ring seal
I think Feynman already beat you to that one.
As an engineering student on TMI Day, I found out about it from a prof who said, out of the blue: "Weather forecast for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: sunny, windy, and 20,000 degrees." What a card. I recently drove through H'burg and seeing the TMI containment structures still made me nervous.
49: That sounds like the premise of a Dilbert.
The counterexample to the Latvian Moisseiff was a self-taught German Czech who faked a credential from one of the top Czech tech schools. He built two excellent bridges in Portland OR and one of the less well-known NYC bridges. There was a New Yorker article on him but I can't Google up any reference to it.
....that produces too large a range of numbers so some podunk, low-traffic client occasionally sees tens of millions of alerts in their report for, say, a day (then calls us, freaking out).
I've been that client. I could never tell whether the person on the other end of the line was calm because there was really no problem, or calm because it was my problem and not his and he didn't feel like sweating it. If he knew what was happening, presumably the company didn't want him to tell.
46: no, I didn't miss that, but I should have clarified that my post was not directly relevant to the main thread but a tangential assertion you seemed to be making there. Full quote, emphasis mine.
"The real argument for me, though, is that many of these kids don't learn algebra until they take calculus. That's the first setting where it's in their best interest to simplify a polynomial or rational function, before proceeding with the problem. They learn the algebra and middle-school math on a much deeper level when they apply it to higher level math they don't really need."
I took that to mean that you were saying that the Algebra I (usually grades 7,8, or somewhat laggingly these days, 9) and even Algebra II (9,10,11) wouldn't have any application for a student until they got to Calculus (usually 11, 12, or even college; possibly never.)--i.e., until they got to calculus, that there would be no other arena in which they would have to apply the general concepts of Algebra or even the specific understanding of polynomials and functions. Perhaps you didn't mean that, but that's what I thought you meant--not in reference to this particular 4-8-teacher in training. I was disagreeing because I see students applying them every day in physics and chemistry (grades 9 and 10), well before calculus. I.e. if you are in my science class and your middle school or 9th grade math teacher does not teach you algebra, I probably will, painful extra time that it might take.
I got a copy of Mario Salvadori's Why Buildings Stand Up
Oh yeah, both this and Why Buildings Fall Down are awesome. The explanation of the gas explosion in Why Buildings Fall Down is one of my favorite engineering stories ever.
OT: I'm trying to find an article that I read, maybe here, by a (college?) teacher who ended up homeless. Talked about how finding heat suddenly becomes the most important daily task, and how difficult it was to seem normal when he went to apply for teaching positions to try to get off the street. Anybody remember this?
56: Oh, sure. Yes. They definitely ought to be applying the middle school math to their chemistry and physics classes, and from what the chem and phys profs at my school say, the kids have a dismal time making that leap.
I should note that my objection to being an engineer working for non-engineers isn't predicated on it always being management's fault, even though my default sympathies are with labor over management. I've known engineers/techs/etc. who went out of their way to obscure their work in a fog of mystery as a protectionist strategy and in the process gummed up the works for everyone. My main point is that if both workers and managers have some idea of how to do something it's easier for someone on either side to call bullshit when needed.
Yes, but not to be able to find it. He and his wife had a dog.
Thanks, everybody. That's the very article.
42: Huh. My understanding had always been that WBSU was the less-interesting followup to WBFD. But I never read the former - everyone assured me that the latter was the interesting one.
once all the really expert or scientific skills were made into credentialed disciplines (starting around 1850 I think), new disciplines were invented which were lacking much specific content: management, education, journalism
I think I've pointed John before towards this paper about the phenomenal success of the the university, but here it is again anyway. Most successful medieval institution ever.
I'd characterize the Simple Dilbertian view as: Managers and employees care as little about quality as they can get away with.
See, I've been nurting a different hypothesis: that professional employees are likely to care more about quality because their personal pride and respect from their peers depends on it. Management, on the other hand, only gets respect from moving the units, no matter how shitty the units are.
I certainly see this in education. Management often just wants to get students credentialed and out the door as quickly as possible. Teachers are the peopel who worry if the students are actually learning, and keep the institution from turning into a diploma mill.
After about seven years living semi-voluntarily in sketchy circumstances nowhere near as bad as what he described, at age 29 this was true of me:
But when the interview started I realized I was no longer someone who could talk the quiet, polite, oblique version of self-promotion demanded by academic hiring committees. I was too deeply, permanently spooked by our condition.
I had never been very good at that, but I spent the years when I should have been learning that skill moving in exactly the wrong direction.
66: WBSU is sort of an illustrated handbook of engineering for the layman. It's a natural followup for a teenager who devoured all the Macaulay books when he was younger, but I doubt it offers much for a practicing architect (or even an architecture student beyond the first year). WBFD is much more enlightening in the same way that college class on engineering failures would have been, but without some sort of background it might be less approachable for the layman. But I say that having read them in the order they were published, and having had an ill-fated stint majoring in architorture. Maybe it's just as accessible, but it's definitely more interesting.
71: Isn't failure always more intersting than success? (For the reader or other outsider that is.)
9
Likewise, education degrees draw less-curious students with immediate material goals, while freezing out people who chose a subject-matter field. (Don't want to overtstate the case, but there's a lot of truth in that.)
You'll have to state your case before you can overstate it. Are you seriously saying that, because it takes a postgraduate degree to be a teacher ("draw less-curious students with immediate material goals"), people get into teaching for the money? That's ridiculous.
My main point is that if both workers and managers have some idea of how to do something it's easier for someone on either side to call bullshit when needed.
Yes, this. It's often said that architecture firms are mismanaged because all but the largest are managed by architects, but, aside from office manager-level stuff and HR, firms don't do anything but architecture, and it would be disastrous to have managers who couldn't look at a design (whether for a doorway or a stadium) and spot critical flaws. Obviously, in larger firms you get hierarchies and the top guys focus more on management-type stuff (because they've shown the aptitude/interest), but I think you have to get to firms with hundreds of employees before you see a real split between management and architects.
This may be tenable because the profession scales well - a well-run firm of 3 can design a $5M building as well as a kitchen renovation - or it may simply be a pervasive flaw.
Wow. That's some article.
Yeah. I very rarely experience any sort of fear in my day-to-day life, but stuff like that or pictures of the tent cities that have sprung up around the country just fill me with dread.
75: A lot of the tent city hype is overblown; not that they don't exist, but my sense from observing the one closest to me is that 98% of the inhabitants were there before the recession and are your usual variety of homeless,* not the victims of the recession.
*Not to say that isn't of itself a symptom of problems, but it would seem (and hear I rely on local reporting, which I don't entirely trust) that many of them prefer the tent city type living to going into a shelter.
71: interesting; I definitely came to it in college, so that may be why it worked well for me.
professional employees are likely to care more about quality because their personal pride and respect from their peers depends on it. Management, on the other hand, only gets respect from moving the units, no matter how shitty the units are.
And not just in for-profit situations. When AB worked for the City, she and her colleagues took their jobs very seriously and professionally, cliches about bureaucrats be damned. But pressure from politicos was generally in the direction of "let's see change/development faster," never "better."
People in the trenches know how to do things properly, and generally have a preference for doing so; higher-ups and the general public can't immediately determine whether things have been done properly, and so the incentive at that end is to show "results," however defined.
The flip side, of course, is worker bees obsessed with perfecting their little corner of the project beyond any reasonable requirements, while the manager can see the big picture. But to return to RMMP's point, that really only works when the manager can intelligently gauge whether the worker bees are engaged fruitfully.
WBFD is much more enlightening in the same way that college class on engineering failures would have been, but without some sort of background it might be less approachable for the layman.
Having read WBFD first, I'd say it's more accessible than WBSU. Or maybe it's just that the "follow this string of events that result in catastrophe" presentation makes it more interesting.
Could pennywise beancounters have borne some culpability for the accident?
It would be no surprise. In the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the design failure obscured the problem of pressure to do the project on the cheap, and I take it as a given that penny-pinching generally is often a factor in engineering failures.
The fallout, so to speak, of TMI is weird. Most people know the name, few people know the particulars, and despite the accident's being credited/blamed for ending new plant construction, it's hard to see how lessons have been learned. The Price-Anderson Act, which indemnifies plant operators (essentially providing a subsidy to the industry, massively distorting cost-benefit analysis) continues to be renewed, and waste, environmental and security issues are still mostly ignored.
For now, this seems like a good way to deal with nuke plants.
73: In most places, to my knowledge, HS, MS and grade-school teaching (which is where education majors go) only takes a BA/BS. If it now takes an MA/MS in some places, that just sounds like credential inflation. It may be that by now public school teaching isn't a materially attractive job any more (teachers in my family say so), but back when I was last in school the ed majors were like I said.
That article made a big impression on me. I've been trying to decide whether it scales to cities/regions/states who enter sudden poverty, or if it is unrelated, or if the lessons are somehow reversed, the way that household budgeting shouldn't be the model for how governments should tighten their belt in recessions.
76: The guy who wrote the article is a pioneer, bellwether or early adapter.
BTW, if people are interested in the "follow this string of events that result in catastrophe" kind of thing that WBFD does, reading up on the Chernobyl disaster is excellent for that sort of thing. It really was a series of fuckups of epic proportions.
"Domain experience" sounds like a B-school term.
83: Yes, I didn't mean to imply that people are not becoming homeless because of the current difficulties. Discussion of the tent cities are just a pet peeve of mine.
(If I was homeless in a place with a decent climate, I'd rather live in a tent in the bushes than in a shelter, and the media attention that the places have gotten has led to much more increased public scrutiny of them, which then leads to attempts to shut them down. Which may be the correct course, but given my own preferences I bristle at it).
About 50 miles outside of Eugene Oregon (near Cougar Hot Springs) here seemed to be a whole culture of homeless living outdoors. Eugene busses went that far out, and there were about 3 or 4 guys on the bus I rode.
Follow up to 86: (God, I need more caffeine). Not discussion, but the recent media hype over the tent cities. Discussion is good and productive and might lead to good change.
87: I forgot to say "twenty years ago".
OT: I'm trying to find an article that I read, maybe here, by a (college?) teacher who ended up homeless.
Yeah, I posted that a while ago . My only purpose in pointing that out is to obnoxiously claim pwnership.
It truly was one of the most terrifying articles I've ever read. There but for luck...
See, I've been nurting a different hypothesis: that professional employees are likely to care more about quality because their personal pride and respect from their peers depends on it. Management, on the other hand, only gets respect from moving the units, no matter how shitty the units are.
I think the number one problem with both economics the discipline and pop economics is a failure to think deeply about motivation. The notion that motivations works through profit alone has been a complete disaster, and ties together so many of the other disasters traceable to econ-type thinking. To an extent it has been a self-fulfilling prophecy, but even when you fully tie status to profit the problems with profit motivation as a form of social organization remain.
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Man, fricken' behavioral job interviews. I just had one. When did this trend start? "Tell me about a time you missed a deadline." "Tell me about a time you had a customer that wasn't satisfied." "Tell me about a time when you've had interpersonal relationship problems in the workplace, and what you did to resolve them."
Basically, it boils down to "Tell me about a time you fucked up, and what you did about it." The interviewee can't win.
And this is interviewing for a technical position, mind you. I blame MBAs.
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I wish that article had a little more detail about how they fell so far and so fast. I'm assuming the guy just couldn't get a job (any job at all? or his wife?), and they didn't have any savings to fall back on, and the bottom just sort of caved all of a sudden when checks started bouncing and the credit cards maxed out and the utilities were cut off, but reading that full narrative would have been very interesting. (Likely both in a "holy shit that could happen so easily to me, or to anyone!" sort of way, and in a "what sort of things could be done (on a personal level) to help minimize the chance of the bottom dropping out?" sort of way.)
The notion that motivations works through profit alone has been a complete disaster, and ties together so many of the other disasters traceable to econ-type thinking.
I'd be interested to see you develop this idea, because I find it counter-intuitive - that is, you are rebutting an Econ 101 concept that I basically accept.
Why make bad loans? Why invent securities that will necessarily blow up? Because there is money to be made.
Econ 101 is a problem because it's stupid and simplistic, yes, but also because its adherents aren't even rigorous enough to apply its rules in a serious-minded fashion.
I still think fondly of a job interview in which I walked in, the guy asked me about a policy question in my field and we talked for twenty minutes about the topic without ever once asking a personal question about me or the workplace. That was the best.
Of course, I didn't get the job. Also, I am nearly certain he'd just gotten dumped by a woman with my name. I'd call and hear him ask the receptionist anxiously "which Megan?". He'd taped the message "You're better off without her" over his desk. I don't think that was a factor, though.
Man, fricken' behavioral job interviews.
"Once I fucked up by making the company $300m dollars and ruining the negative earnings forecase. And other time I had a customer that wasn't satisfied with our product, and after a half hour with me they were satisfied with our product but dissatisfied with their husband. And other time I missed this deadline seeing as I was late getting back from smuggling blind orphans out of Moldovan brothels because the Special Forces guys had had some trouble with their Apache chopper."
If profit were the only thing that motivated, I wouldn't be in grad school.
"Tell me about a time you missed a deadline."
Once I was given a week to move stuff from one server to another, but it wasn't clear when the relevant week began, so we missed the cutoff. I got someone to ask the hosting company for more time, which they provided.
96: Nor I in my chosen career - hell, I suspect most of us here are smart enough to work out some kind of Ponzi scheme, if we were so inclined.
I hope my 93 didn't seem that simplistic.
We were just talking upthread about how some workers simply like to do a better job than you would do if you were maximizing profit.
Health insurance has been another good example of a situation where maximizing profit is not the same as serving your customers' interests, but the customers are captured and have to participate.
We were just talking upthread about how some workers simply like to do a better job than you would do if you were maximizing profit.
Health insurance has been another good example of a situation where maximizing profit is not the same as serving your customers' interests, but the customers are captured and have to participate.
but also because its adherents aren't even rigorous enough to apply its rules in a serious-minded fashion.
There are two main problems I see on this front -- first, the one that I think PGD is referring to, that people have motivations other than profit. Second, and this seems too simpleminded to say, but even though people acknowledge it all the time, other people look as if they've forgotten it: banks/corporations/other institutions aren't people, and aren't directly motivated by profit. The decision makers for those entities are motivated by personal profit and by everything else that motivates people, and there's an attempt to align the motivations of the decision makers with the interests of the entity, but that's a really hard problem. Given that, you can't analyze the actions of a corporation by assuming that it's 'self-interested' in any simple sense.
95: Yeah, see, you can't win. Apache choppers are a terrible choice for smuggling orphans. They are all guns and no cargo. You want something roomier, like a Chinook. So, obviously you have poor planning capabilities. No job for you.
A lot of Megans are problematic, no doubt about that. My son's girlfriend who dumped him was a Megan. And then there's Megan McArdle. And young Ms. McCain. Just scratching the surface.
A lot of economics only applies to a very narrow range of businessmen, but economics really purports to study the fundamentals of society.
banks/corporations/other institutions aren't people
Ok, but they're persons.
They're persons, so it's not irrational to hate them the way you'd hate any other evil person.
When you talk to economists about ego-motivation as something separate from profit motivation, they immediately acknowledge its existence, because, after all, that is what motivated them to be economists rather than businessmen. Then they turn right around and say that cash can be used as a good proxy for other motivations, or that all motivations can be measured in dollar units, or whatever.
I think they can do this because they are in a society where income is always a key component of status. Not the only component, but a key one. This leaves them unable to deal the the behavior of cultures or subcultures that ignore material wealth or actively despise it.
The professional who is so dedicated to the craft that they become voluntarily homeless, in the Paul Erdos/rms mode, is a logical impossibility for them.
Was rms kicked out of his office or something?
Blind orphans are constantly pushing the wrong button in the chopper, though.
Becks does Behavioral Interviewing:
Becks [To self] Seems like a really strong candidate ... [Aloud] So, tell me about a time you fucked up.
Candidate: Well once blah blah blah ... blah blah and so I was like, FML, you know?
Becks: Next.
And isn't it rather presumptuous for persons such as rhc and I to call him "rms"?
Megans and corporations are both persons. Need I say more?
Hating orphans? That's dark, man.
If orphans want not to be hated they should do something about it, like having living parents.
And this is interviewing for a technical position, mind you. I blame MBAs.
I've gotten one of these recently and gave a matter-of-fact answer identical in tone to 97. Turned out that's what they wanted, which was a pleasant surprise. I just didn't have any barns I could claim I'd burned down by accident, nor any great life lessons learned from it.
Please don't let this become another econ thread.
All I was getting at is that a good social scientist should be investigating the full range of human motivations, asking about the strengths and weaknesses of each, and how you should structure society to make the best use of each in the most appropriate areas. Economists prescriptions way over-incent on profit, because they effectively assume it is the only "real" motivation and everything is else is weird and squishy and can't be managed. From a purely intellectual aspect, that's partly because you generally need a numeraire commodity to make economic models work, so agents need to be paid off in a single commodity that can be numerically measured.
Second, and this seems too simpleminded to say, but even though people acknowledge it all the time, other people look as if they've forgotten it: banks/corporations/other institutions aren't people, and aren't directly motivated by profit. The decision makers for those entities are motivated by personal profit and by everything else that motivates people, and there's an attempt to align the motivations of the decision makers with the interests of the entity, but that's a really hard problem.
Economists do talk a ton about the agency problems you refer to, it's very standard to worry about that. But naturally they try to solve the agency problem by -- guess what -- introducing the right profit motivations! (Like stock options for CEOs to align their incentives with stockholders). It would be much closer to accurate to say that agency problems cannot really be solved through profit motivations, that profit is actually a type of motivation that is peculiarly ill suited to agency problems, and you need to try to create a particular sort of culture.
Of course, it is still very useful for organizations to face hard budget constraints. A big issue with thinking about private organizations competing in a capitalist market is separating the existence of hard budget constraints (generally good) from a relentless focus on profit maximization (often bad).
A lot of Megans are problematic, no doubt about that.
It didn't used to be a problem when everyone I knew was Asian-Am. Those were the good days when the problem was too many Jins and Sungs and you had to ask 'Hoa with which accent?'. I swear I didn't meet another Megan until I was twenty and now they're everywhere. I am strongly prejudiced against new Megans.
Hah. I was in a high school class with five other girls named Elizabeth. In college, I had two roommates at different times named Elizabeth. I am now in a six-attorney section of my office in which there are three Elizabeths. I have no sympathy for anyone else on this front.
girls named Elizabeth
You lucky, lucky bastard!
91
Basically, it boils down to "Tell me about a time you fucked up, and what you did about it." The interviewee can't win.
One time, the subject of an article I wrote tried to bribe me to let him review the article before it was published, which is against the newspaper's policy for obvious reasons. I didn't, but at his badgering I wound up "checking my quotes for accuracy" in more detail than usual, basically going over the article with him over the phone. I wish I had just told him off and hung up.
The thing is, it wasn't even an intelligent bribe. He was offering to buy advertising from the paper. It's not like the reporter gets a commission from that...
All things considered, that's probably a better answer to the question than anything one could make up. It's a genuine fuckup, although minor in that case, but it's a random and oddball enough situation that there aren't clear instructions on how to handle it and there's no reason to expect the same problem to come up at the job I was interviewing for.
Economists do talk a ton about the agency problems you refer to, it's very standard to worry about that.
Oh, I'm certainly not claiming this is an exciting new insight, it's just one that seems easy to forget. You hear people asking "Why would banks make loans they knew would go bad?" and of course the answer is that the people who 'knew' that they were making sketchy loans weren't the owners of the money being loaned.
Oh, I'm certainly not claiming this is an exciting new insight,
I don't think any of the critiques of econ at unfogged are *new*. We just keep making them because the economists haven't been fed to hogs yet.
Pointing at agency problems isn't even a critique of econ, although it's sometimes a critique of knee-jerk 'private industry will inevitably do whatever it is better than government'ism.
118: Please don't let this become another econ thread.
Too late. "There are only economics threads everything else is etamp collecting."
The econ threads will continue until all the economists are fed to hogs.
129: are we using the narrow or the broad definition of "economist"?
Heh. At the UnfoggeDCon pre-con there were three guys with my first name.
On the plus side, all the Megans I've met have been either good or neutral on the Togolosh human worth scale. Elizabeths have been a decidedly mixed bag, including one crazy soul-leech girlfriend and a drug addled stalker.
I'm very offended by that comment, and I know where your dog goes to obedience school.
It would be much closer to accurate to say that agency problems cannot really be solved through profit motivations, that profit is actually a type of motivation that is peculiarly ill suited to agency problems, and you need to try to create a particular sort of culture.
Tell me more! Seems to me that agency problems are - in the context of economics - almost by definition caused by screwed up profit incentives and are therefore are most amenable to solutions related to profit - with the word "profit" reasonably broadly construed.
How do you keep people from stealing money? Two obvious answers are: the credible threat of impoverishment and/or jail; profitable alternatives to thievery.
I gather that, even after making allowance for brevity, you regard this as oversimple. What am I missing?
Actually, I rather like giving behavioral interviews.
I find they work well if not too rigorously interpreted (which some of our HR nitwits try to push, "You must ask X questions of type Y.") or totally crowd out domain knowledge questions. They give a structure that keeps me in line, and they generally work well at identifying the vague BSers.
How many Mary Elizabeths in the mix?
I'm very offended by that comment, and I know where your dog goes to obedience school.
It's what Rah calls "state-dependent memory," though. You have to get wicked high to remember how to get there and if you're too high you forget he has a dog.
133: "I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan togolosh!"
Seems to me that agency problems are - in the context of economics - almost by definition caused by screwed up profit incentives
And here is your mistake. Rather than showing that all problems can be solved by changing the incentive structure, you assume that all motivations are reducible to cash incentives, and then use that to frame the problem.
How do you keep people from stealing money? Two obvious answers are: the credible threat of impoverishment and/or jail; profitable alternatives to thievery.
Yet strangely, jail and jobs alone rarely solve crime. The main variable that effects crime rates are the number of men between the ages of 18 and 35, and how integrated they are into the community. And "integrated into the community" doesn't mean "making money." Church groups that pay nothing are as good or better at keeping the boys out of trouble as are summer jobs.
You may have been talking about white collar theft, but the basic reasoning still applies. It is not money, but a personal stake in the community that keeps people honest.
How do you keep people from stealing money?
Eradicate capitalism. Bah, this seems an interesting thread, but the IRS is just tempting me to fuck up and have no explanation, and the announced death of philosophy is astonishing!
heebie--I think she could be certified for 2-6th, but I would not have been able to pass 8th grade algebra, if I didn't know how to simplify 1^n. It's true that I'd forgotten it, but all that means is that I've forgotten most of the math I knew.
125: it's easy to elide it because it's not a discrete problem with a solution, it's a very deep issue that basically forces you to think about the whole problem of human social organization. Thus making you, e.g. move beyond economics, or whatever your common-sense simplification of choice is.
Here is a really good book on the impossibility of solving principal/agent problems through economic means alone. Might be a little dated, and accessible/simple, but really really good.
totally crowd out domain knowledge questions.
This was the problem with the interview I just had. Also, the interview process goes both ways.... If an organization that give behavioral interviews that make people squirm, it makes that organization seem lame, and a strong candidate with other options would be less likely to accept a job.
How do you keep people from stealing money?
At the bottom end -necessity driven theft- you provide them with enough of a safety net that they don't have to steal to meet their needs.
Slightly higher up the scale, you make sure they have enough to lose in their regular lives that risk from lawbreaking is less appealing.
Other causes of theft, like entertainment or exorbitant greed, have other solutions. (Penny ante shoplifting for thrills probably doesn't threaten the republic and can be dealt with interpersonally. Exorbitant greed brings us back to thoughts of hog farms, stakes and pitchforks.)
LB, do you consider Elisabeths to be of the same name as you? That is my daughter's name and I was the one that insisted on the 's', either because I am some kind of pompous bounder or because I wanted to avoid any chance of her being called "Liz". Or both.
it's a random and oddball enough situation that there aren't clear instructions on how to handle it
I understand the dislike for stupid corporate interview tricks, including the behavioral questions, but the above is why they can be genuinely useful. I want to know if my staff can handle situations for which they haven't been given specific instructions.
I don't use a protocol for interviews (at least not for employment-related ones), but I do try very hard to suss out whether the candidate can make decent judgments in a situation they haven't faced before. Being able to make good decisions on the fly is a side effect of having good decisionmaking abilities generally. It's not the only variable worth looking at, but it's not useless.
I wanted to avoid any chance of her being called "Liz"
I highly doubt you've achieved that.
I wanted to avoid any chance of her being called "Liz".
You have certainly not done that.
Re: economists reducing motivations to cash incentives. It's like the story about the guy looking for his keys under the street light, even though he lost them somewhere else, in the dark. (I'm sure that's been said before, but it fits, so whatever.)
Similar thoughts regarding philosophy, not economics:
When reading various philosophers I don't like, I've sensed that they would rather be getting SOMETHING done than, what looks to them like, wandering around the desert, pondering the opaque, gnarly imponderables; they'd rather have a ridiculous answer than no answer. I say, if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well (or, with precise notation). It's like there's an entire breed out there who just want to use the latest logic, nevermind the nature of the subject matter to which it is supposed to be applied. The same breed who respond to criticisms leveraged at the foundation of their analyses with, "Well, what's your answer/model/etc.?" I want to say, calm down, it's okay to not know what to do or say. "I don't know" is not a reductio. Whence comes this urgency, this intense focus on getting something, *anything*, done?
I didn't want to make a career out of being the Wittgensteinian, anti-scientistic/naturalistic thorn in everyone's side, so (and for other reasons) I left the discipline. Woo hoo, tent city here I come!
you make sure they have enough to lose in their regular lives that risk from lawbreaking is less appealing.
This assumes that lawbreaking is the preferred behavior in the absence of constraints against it. Rather, we'd prefer a society in which it would not be the default behavior.
I'm sorry to even say that, it's so obvious. Anyway, it's probably pwned a million times upthread, certainly by rob at 108.2:
I think they can do this because they are in a society where income is always a key component of status. Not the only component, but a key one. This leaves them unable to deal the the behavior of cultures or subcultures that ignore material wealth or actively despise it.
enough to lose in their regular lives
This is pretty hard. If I did not have a kid, the temptation to flake out for months at a time would be hard to resist, and I live in a stable place with a job that's often interesting. I really respect people who try to bring order to chaotic places that do not work well.
Good for you, Currence, even if anti-scientistic/naturalistic thorns in sides are in general to be encouraged.
146: Yes, that's the same name, just like Megan/Meghan/Maygan. And you can't make any given nickname impossible by spelling it funny.
"Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsey and Bess
Went to the woods to get a bird's nest,
They found a nest with four eggs in it,
They took one apiece, and left three in it."
JP, If you start calling her Lisa, nobody will ever call her Liz.
Currence, you're going to make me read that David Brooks op-ed, aren't you?
I know an Elisabeth who is called "Lis", as in "lissome".
Also, the interview process goes both ways.... If an organization that give behavioral interviews that make people squirm, it makes that organization seem lame, and a strong candidate with other options would be less likely to accept a job.
There's nothing particularly nefarious about behavioral interview questions. To my mind, they're a damn sight better than "What is your greatest weakness?".
Nor do I think they are necessarily intended to make the candidates squirm. I bend over backwards to make candidates comfortable, because I want them to be able to present themselves as they are, not under an artificial stress situation.
Behavioral questions can reveal a lot. A capable candidate has nothing to fear from describing how they dealt with a situation, and should feel reassured that the employer actually cares about that, as opposed to a self-laudatory recitation of sales figures increased and budgets undershot.
Serious interviewers know that life is messy, and not every problem has a sit-com resolution; an anecdote that comes across as too neat and tidy may even suggest that the candidate is blind to complications.
156: Yes, I was looking for that poem when I posted.
BTW, she's now 20 and goes by Beth.
For whatever reason I find it very difficult to keep Elisabeths and Elizabeths apart from one another in my head. There are a few of each in my life, and I never know which is which without checking written records. (This includes my wife, unfortunately. Although it's only her middle name.)
I find it amazing that whole disciplines can have extended discussions about controlling human behavior without ever mentioning shame, guilt, and internalization.
It seems obvious to me that people do the right thing most of the time not because of external punishments, but because they have internalized those social norms. Violating the internalized norm will trigger emotions like shame and guilt, so people mostly police themselves.
I imagine that most people reading this are neither rapists nor murderers, and that fear of punishment is not the only thing holding them back. For the big things that hold society together, we can rely on internalization.
This assumes that lawbreaking is the preferred behavior in the absence of constraints against it. Rather, we'd prefer a society in which it would not be the default behavior.
I'm only worried about deterrents for the population of would-be thieves, whom I think are a subset of everyone. I was neglecting ways to stop all the people who would never steal anyway. (They should also have enough to be vested in their lives.)
damn sight better than "What is your greatest weakness?"
But it has such potential!
146
I knew a Stephen when I was younger, and I remember being puzzled that he went by Steve.
158
I don't know which op-ed that is... (so, no, I won't make you, hehe)
difficult to keep Elisabeths and Elizabeths apart
Rrrrowr.
I once dated a girl named Lisbeth. I assumed for the longest time that her name was short for Elisabeth, but then I saw her passport and ascertained that she had been christened thus.
she had been christened thus
I don't see any way you can shorten Thus into Lisbeth. You sure you aren't just making that up?
123, 169: You have some history with women named Elizabeth you want to talk about, or have I missed something?
168.2: Here. Linked in another thread recently.
If I were a tree I'd be a box elder tree. Am I hired?
174: No way, do they ask questions like that, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
No way!
Um, lilac. Because obviously.
167: I love Dagger Aleph's answer on that thread, especially if said with a whistful, far-away look.
Box elders are the best little kid climbing trees.
Nobody hires box elders. If you want the job, the best answer is "oak".
172: I surmise that he is envisioning Elisabeth and Elizabeth in circumstances where it is difficult keeping them apart and, being of the testosterone-saturated gender, he is imagining such circumstances to be unbearably hot.
176: Would be even better if given in response to a question about hobbies.
179: I guess, but then what was 123 about?
Everyone knows girls named Eli[sz]abeth are just the hottest, dirtiest, sluttiest sluts around (NTTAWWT).
If I were a tree I'd be a box elder tree. Am I hired?
This is a consulting job? I'd go with "strangler fig".
182: I'm just saying -- have I been contending with an unsuspected reputation for nominal harlotry all these years?
Everyone knows girls named Eli[sz]abeth are just the hottest, dirtiest, sluttiest sluts around.
It all depends on the nickname they go by
Elisabeth/Elizabeth = hot, but not dirty or slutty
Meg = hot and dirty, but not slutty
Liz = neither hot, nor dirty, nor slutty
Betsy = dirty, but not hot or slutty
Betty = hot and slutty
Lisbeth = hot, occasionally dirty, not slutty
Maggie = hot, occasionally slutty, but not dirty
Beth = slutty
Liza = dirty and slutty, but not hot
then what was 123 about?
Oh dear. In response to your complaint that you had a dozen or so Elizabeths for roommates/colleagues, I signed the comment "Guy Dude" and the "lucky lucky bastard" was (he shamefully admits) a play on the Monty Python "nights I've laid awake dreaming of being spat upon" bit.
Meg and Maggie are nicknames for Margaret, though.
That is, the one name that would be more common.
P^2: You forgot Lisa, Lizzy, and Lizardbreath.
Also, where do I go...I mean does my friend go...to get the triple package.
188: Right you are. Substitute some other variant of "Elisabeth" and pretend it was funny, Kthx.
I accidentally tasted a box elder bug the other day. Not as bad as you think, sort of piney. As far as I know we both survived.
Maybe a breadfruit true. Shade, balsa-like wood, barkcloth, fruit, medicine, poison. I'd leave out the poison.
where do I go...I mean does my friend go...to get the triple package
Queen Elizabeth.
191: The red light district caters to your friend's very desires.
But in Act Five I'd say, as the interviewer was writhing on the ground, "I left out one thing when you asked me about the breadfruit tree."
187/189: wow. If anyone got this joke, I'll be impressed.
187: (Obviously, no offense of any kind taken -- I just hate that whizzing noise jokes make as they go over my head.)
I'm partial to baobob trees myself. Nobody messes with the baobob.
198: *I* got it, dammit. Perhaps I'm just too subtle and sophisticated for this crowd.
I will admit that I am a little disappointed to find out that 123 wasn't supopsed to be dirty somehow.
201: well, yes, obviously too subtle and sophisticated. My point was that I'll be impressed with anyone who got the joke--they're much sharper than me.
134
How do you keep people from stealing money? Two obvious answers are: the credible threat of impoverishment and/or jail; profitable alternatives to thievery.
Hire people who don't care a lot about money. Induce your employees to indentify with the company.
Profit incentives can be counterproductive if they attract people who have an abnormal lust for money.
obviously too subtle and sophisticated
186: i dated a girl named Margaret, and she was often hot, occasionally slutty, but never dirty.
205: ...my name would be George Washington.
||
Picking up on the 8/9 baking advice from yesterday: I'm doing a passover-safe chocolate flourless cake for tonight. The recipe serves 8-12; in order to boost it for 16 but not overflow my 9" springform pan, I'm boosting it by 1/3.
Questions Two:
1. How should I adjust 35-40 min bake time @ 350 F?
2. It's easy to boost 6 eggs by 1/3, less so to boost 2 eggs whole/4 eggs separated. Think it'll be OK to go 3 eggs whole/5 eggs separated?
|>
I rescind that last "|>" until my question is answered.
being run by people with a business background instead of domain experience.
I don't think this is correct; managing is a different skill than (e.g.) being a good civil engineer. But I think the problem is that an MBA alone doesn't make one a competent or ethical manager, and the fetish follows the credentials, but not the skill. (The ideal combination would seem to be someone who had the domain experience and the management training.)
208: For a flourless cake, I'm not sure that's going to work -- there's not much holding it up to begin with, and I think overfilling the pan gives you a real risk of collapse. You couldn't do two pans?
Hire people who don't care a lot about money. Induce your employees to identify with the company.
This is the Moonie zombie slave management paradigm.
People who don't care a lot about money? But then you would have no idea how to model their economic behavior.
211: I could, but then I'd have to go out and get more ingredients (and another springform). Maybe I'll just do the straight recipe and bring ice cream too. Or put the extra third in another small pan. Think it would come out of a rectangular baking dish OK?
Probably wouldn't come out clean, but you could have one pretty cake, and then bring the baking dish and serve slightly less pretty pieces out of that, if you see what I mean.
Thanks, LB. Although I'd prefer to hear from someone credentialized in the management of bakers.
183
This is a consulting job? I'd go with "strangler fig".
Cool tree. I have the vague sense that I've seen one somewhere, but I never read about how they grew like that.
As parasites that can outgrow the host go, the strangler fig is by far the least icky.
As parasites that can outgrow the host go, the strangler fig is by far the least icky.
WHAT ABOUT ANKLEBITERS AM I RITE???
NEVERMIND ACTUALLY ONLY PART OF THEIR LIFECYCLE IS OUTSIDE THE HOST
you could have one pretty cake, and then bring the baking dish and serve slightly less pretty pieces out of that, if you see what I mean
I do this when cooking for family gatherings. Pretty pieces from the round pan for people I love, crummy pieces from the square pan for stepchildren, penurious uncles, and unattractive nieces and nephews.
They know exactly what it means, oh yes.
Maybe I'll just do the straight recipe and bring ice cream too.
Yes. I wouldn't try to increase a recipe like that. And a cake that serves 8-12 is enough for 16 anyway, since some won't eat dessert.
You should take pity on the penurious uncles. Serve the ugly cake to the tightfisted uncles.
I didn't know "penurious" had the second meaning.
And a cake that serves 8-12 is enough for 16 anyway, since some won't eat dessert.
And meatloaf only has to be 20% meat.
Carpet is less than 20% cars or pets.
Carpet is less than 20% cars or pets.
I guess at that point you wouldn't really consider them your pets.
Have I killed the blog?
Don't worry, everyone, Ploofy is fine. I have wood floors.
She was named after my mother, you bastard.
213: People who don't care a lot about money? But then you would have no idea how to model their economic behavior.
This made me laugh.
210 gets it right. Being an expert in your area doesn't necessarily mean you can manage your way out of a paper bag. This gets particularly pernicious when you don't even acknowledge that management is actual work that needs to be taken as seriously as you take your "real" profession.
(Yes, I know people like this.)
I guess at that point you wouldn't really consider them your pets.
Our pet fleas are "part" of the carpet, except when the cat takes them for a walk.
I'm surprised Becks hasn't got more to say about this, since she is, in fact, management.
I don't think Becks reads the threads following from her own posts.
235: She has assistants for that.
208: I'd just stick to one cake. Chocolate flourless cake is really rich (as you know), so you can slice it teeny tiny and serve some ice cream along side and be just fine.
Thanks for all the advice. I gave up on my cake conundrum for the moment (part of the issue is that it wants 3 8" layers, I'm too dumb to do the math increase right to make enough batter for 3 9" layers and while I could just make the whole cake smaller, I'd have to cut the frosting and filling recipes down to size too). I'm going to save it for a weekend and just make brownies tonight.
Or, you could just eat the extra frosting and filling.
There are now two cakes. I haven't tasted either, but they look OK. Maybe a little denser than preferred.
Note: it is no problem at all upping 3/4 cup of sugar by a factor of 4/3. However, once you are told to use 1/3 cup of that 3/4 cup in the egg yolks and save the rest for the egg whites, it gets tricky.
Also I thought the whole flourless cake that still has eggs and baking time was not entirely in keeping with the theme of Hurry Up And Make Some Bread of Affliction Before the 'Gyptians Get Us (sorry m leblanc). So I replaced the sugar with salt.
What are you talking about? Almond cake is a passover specialty and you're damn sure it's got eggs and baking time. Don't be one of those crazies who doesn't eat matzoh ball soup because the balls expand.
I made one of those two, but with razorblades instead of almonds. What can I say? I must be one of those crazies.
I made one of those two, but with razorblades instead of almonds. What can I say? I must be one of those crazies.
Now that's just two embarrassing.
I once had a summer job writing Fortran code for a guy who's full-time job was as a consultant for the defendants in the TMI lawsuits. He had two full-time employees, too.
"whose," Walt, dammit, "whose."
I'm not even nosflow, but there's a horrid argument over elsewhere that's just got me all het up, I tell you what.
Peace to you, Walt.
246: I have dishonored myself and my family.
No, it's okay. "whose" would just be fine. People just have such a hard time admitting these things. It makes us all feel better when they do.
You're trying to use helpy-chalk's observation that shame is an effective tool of social control, aren't you?
249: Of course not! Wait. Observation of correct spelling and grammar is a tool of social control? I may have to take a deep breath.
Or, you could just eat the extra frosting and filling.
I could, but not even I have a sweet tooth large enough to take on salted caramel and whipped chocolate caramel ganache all by their lonesome.
(I am so trying to make something out of my baking league with this cake. I should just stick to brownies).
250: I am quite curious about what you'll think about David Foster Wallace's essay on grammar (the one I mentioned that is in Consider the Lobster).*
*What an ugly sentence.
252.1: You'll have to wait until I get my hands on it and read it.
Right now, he's just about tapped me out with his extended carrying on about the bathrooms on the luxury cruise ship in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." I may have to take a break.
Observation of correct spelling and grammar is a tool of social control?
What else could it possibly be?
I could, but not even I have a sweet tooth large enough to take on salted caramel and whipped chocolate caramel ganache all by their lonesome.
Neither do I, but I bet that together, we could conquer it.
254: Dissertations have been written on less.
255: I'll mail you some in exchange for a mix CD. It should hold up.
It would probably be worth it for the tupperware alone.
12: MDs are famous for being horrible managers
Managing Directors are actually a rather high form of manager.
Back to the OP: "Add realism and EXCITEMENT to your train layout!" Nuclear plant model based on Three Mile Island.
From the same museum collection, an even more off the wall item, a Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab for kids (sold 1950-51). The radioactive sources in your Gilbert Atomic Energy lab will, in a period ranging from 1 to 50 years, deteriorate with time. Therefore, when replacement of your Alpha, Beta, Gamma, or Cloud Chamber sources is required ... fill in the coupon below and send it to the A. C. Gilbert Company.
Managing Directors are actually a rather high form of manager.
But commonly horrible.
Management is a skill set that can be taught, but is not sufficient for being a good manager. If you want to be a physics professor, somewhere along the line you need to acquire a first degree in physics and to do some serious courses in research methods. Neither will qualify you on its own. Sending an MBA to manage an engineering shop is like appointing somebody as a physics prof who has a string of A+s in methodology but can't define the secord law of thermodynamics. Unless the MBA has an engineering background, in which case there's added value.
I'm loathe to make broad generalizations about what credentials do or don't suffice to make a good manager; people are variable, and there are anecdotes to support almost any position.
One generalization I will venture from my own experience is that people with engineering backgrounds have to be taught to think in terms of the 80-20 rule (the "good enough" approximation) in order to succeed in management.
There comes a point where the sheer number of decisions you are called on to make (and the number of relevant variables involved in making those decisions) overwhelms the ability of mortal man to assemble all the relevant facts and analyze them exhaustively. An engineer trained in the habits of precise calculations and significant digits may find it challenging to recognize that certain decisions can be triaged into the "make your best judgement" bucket* because they aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. That flies in the face of the engineering mind-set, where even the smallest component has the potential to cause a catastrophic failure if it isn't properly and conscientiously engineered.
Businesses can sometimes collapse like a bridge, but generally they don't, and it is uneconomical to treat every little decision like the choice of an o-ring for the space shuttle.
To the subordinates who view this process from below, decision triage can seem like an affront: "The work I'm doing, the detailed knowledge I have gained, is being ignored by the arrogant big-wig who can't be bothered to inform himself about it!"
Someone expressed earlier in the thread the opinion that good middle management mediates between these points of view. I think that's right, and would add that good mediation consists in large part of helping senior management correctly distinguish between the 80 and the 20 in an 80-20 decision.
* "Bad" managers take it to the other extreme; they rely too uncritically on their own intuition and judgment because they are too lazy or incapable to understand the essential facts, or to separate the essential from the non-essential. This is the George W. Bush model of manager.
One generalization I will venture from my own experience is that people with engineering backgrounds have to be taught to think in terms of the 80-20 rule (the "good enough" approximation) in order to succeed in management.
Damn true. OTOH, managers without engineering backgrounds need to learn to identify critical failure points so they don't regard the 80-20 rule as something that can be applied indiscriminately: "This plane is big enough, fast enough, fuel efficient enough, inside budget, its wings fall off. OK, 4 out of 5 criteria met, project authorised." If you haven't yet met a management decision like this, it's only a matter of time. Ask NASA.
To elaborate, for most companies, in most situations, the situation isn't "Its wings fall off", which any fool can spot as a show stopper - it's the situations where a perfectly non-lethal vulnerability gets built into a system such that it performs just sub-optimally enough to lose the customer's confidence (and contract). A manager needs to be able to assess the technical detail coming at her from her specialists to spot these, even if the rest of the information associated with the proposal/milestone report/etc. is overwhelmingly positive.
Usually she gets a clue from the fact that her specialists, who have not yet internalised that quality =/= able to function under the conditions at the heart of the sun, will be screaming from the rooftops about it. But if she allows herself either to filter out those screams under pressure of time or higher management, or to fail to identify the one specialist who is a little too relaxed, then she is doomed, because she will miss the one case in a hundred where 80/20 will not do. She needs some background in the specialisms.
No disagreement with either 264 or 265. And I have seen decisions go wrong along the lines described therein. I was pushing back against the "specialists good, managers bad" vibe that people can sometimes fall into out of an excess of sympathy with the underdog.
Also, a decison that led to some bad outcomes was not necessarily a bad decision. One can only assess it against the totality of circumstances. To those toiling below, the negative consequences may seem overwhelming and utterly foreseable ("If those idiots had asked me I could have told them this would happen.").
In some cases, the negative outcome (or the possibility thereof) might well have been foreseen by the decision-maker and judged to be outweighed by other considerations. Those other considerations may have been venal ones -- personal aggrandizement, organizational politics, etc. -- in which case the decision-maker deserves our scorn. But one can't automatically assume that the decision was made in error or in bad faith just because it resulted in some bad outcomes.
One generalization I will venture from my own experience is that people with engineering backgrounds have to be taught to think in terms of the 80-20 rule (the "good enough" approximation) in order to succeed in management.
Analytic philosophers applying for consulting jobs have to learn this too; according to the nice consulting people, it's a problem common to academics.
Analytic philosophers applying for consulting jobs have to learn this too
Boy, there's a joke sitting right there, but I don't know enough about philosophy, analytic or otherwise, to make it.
Dammit.
Boy, there's a joke sitting right there, but I don't know enough about philosophy, analytic or otherwise, to make it.
"We've mapped your position on this 2X2 cognitive-ethical matrix. You are currently positioned in the bottom left corner: behaviorist-subjectivist. Your strategic challenge is to migrate to the top right box: functionalist-relativist."
I thought ED programs were supposed to be fluffy?
Brock, this is fluffy. If you do it properly, it's called analysis, not Calc I. Seriously, at the majority of universities these days, Cal I - Cal II (less so Cal III) is pretty much high school extended, with less hand holding and nose wiping. It's not technical at all. The upside is that it can be good training for problem solving, and very rough understanding of functons and dynamics.
1. "MBA culture" in a public utility in the 1970s? Are you sure?
2. Everything that goes to shit, tends to be the fault of the people who were in charge of it, who are typically managers. Conversely, when things succeed, this is usually also due to the actions of the people who were in charge of it.
3. As I keep saying and none of the Dilberts appears to have a better answer than "oh you're just a troll", any argument of this sort really does have a problem with explaining why it was that living standards got so very much better, so very much quicker, at more or less exactly the same time that scientific approaches started being taken to management.
271.3: Imagine how great everything would be without all the managers fucking it up.
I credit it to heavy drug use, but whatever.
Dsquared should write up a unified theory once he's got little Vlad and Cruella paid off.
They're blackmailing him already? So young, and so precocious.
why it was that living standards got so very much better, so very much quicker, at more or less exactly the same time that scientific approaches started being taken to management.
What time frame are you thinking of here?
I notice that the wikipedia entry on Taylorism contains the following sentence:
In management literature today, the greatest use of the concept of Taylorism is as a contrast to a new, improved way of doing business.
If you believe that people who currently argue for the benefits of "management training" also believe that what they are doing is different from the original use of the term "scientific management" that suggests four possibilities:
1) Taylorism contributed to great improvements in living standards. Current management is not Taylorism and may or may not offer benefits.
2) However bad management is now, there is some benefit in "professionalizing" management that applies no matter what the specific content of "scientific management" theories.
3) The connection between improved living standard and the rise of Taylorism was a not causal, and neither Taylorism nor current management practices necessarily add value.
4) The benefits of scientific management continue to improve, and the current theories and practices are more valuable and effective than those of Taylorists.
The other possibility, of course, is that I'm reading too much into a throw-away sentence.
261: I had that atomic energy kit. Great fun, and my kids weren't born with mutant powers or terrible defects either.
As for managers, most are average by definition. That's fine under average conditions. However, I keep seeing them persist in doing their same old things when conditions change around them. It's too bad they mostly escape paying for those mistakes while the people they manage get tossed on the scrape heap.
Also "domain experience" here is totally weasel. How many architects have experience of laying bricks? How many engineers have experience of working a lathe to make parts? Not that many, I'd guess, but they have experience of formulating a plan of how such things should be organised on a large scale to accomplish a goal. Fair enough. Now, what "domain experience" might be relevant to the administration of, say, Wal-Mart? What would it be about greeting people and chasing trolleys round a car park that would teach you how to run a logistics operation?
276.1: Outstanding. You might enjoy Conelrad, a great site that explores all manner of early Cold War/Atomic pop culture. One of my favorite finds on the Internet.
