[HN Gopher] Beware what sounds insightful
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Beware what sounds insightful
Author : janandonly
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-02-28 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commoncog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commoncog.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Amusing quotes:
|
| _" A "steering" event at the CEO level is a reorientation for
| the entire company, and for reasons I'll get to, the best way to
| accomplish it is to replace the CEO with a new one who is already
| locked on to a more desirable orientation vector."_
|
| In other words, it may be easier to change the CEO than the CEO's
| mind. (A possibly useful criterion: when did the CEO last admit a
| mistake? If the answer is "never", and reality indicates the need
| for a change of direction, the CEO has to go.)
|
| _" Also: look at how I use the phrase 'optimised for attention'
| here, when I could have just as simply said 'liked to be read'."_
|
| Not quite. "Optimized for click-through", more specifically.
| Here's a topic from CNN right now: "Certain health conditions in
| adolescence may be linked with faster aging in adulthood, study
| says." Note that this doesn't tell you what those conditions are.
| You have to click to find out. That's become all too common.
| Until recently, the unit of consumer buy was the book or
| newspaper, not the article. There was no incentive for article
| titles which deliberately gave too little information. That
| stopped at headlines and book titles. Now it extends to each
| little snippet of information. The actual article can be
| summarized as "Teens who are fat, smoke, or have psych problems
| age faster." If they said that up front, fewer people would click
| on the article.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> In other words, it may be easier to change the CEO than the
| CEO's mind._
|
| Makes me wonder, is that a bad thing? Do we want CEOs with
| plastic minds? It feels like we live in an age of excess
| plasticity, with respect to leadership. (Perhaps it always
| does.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| Even if the entire power structure agrees not to change,
| reality still will.
| swayvil wrote:
| To take this further. A world made of words and ideas, detached
| from real observation, must necessarily be completely psychotic.
|
| We're talking Bosch's Garden here. Demons, skulls, fire and
| snakes.
|
| Consider our modern nigh-solipsistic society. And videogames. And
| us, wrapped in an airtight bag of propaganda and entertainment.
|
| Consider that excellent insulation. Consider the anaerobic
| ravioli.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That sounds insightful tho...
| hitekker wrote:
| A similar point was raised in
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348755905_The_Seduc...
| which was surfaced at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30354969.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Tarbell's portrayal of JD Rockefeller is certainly worth reading
| again in today's New Gilded Age era, biases and all. I suppose
| Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" is a more objective history, although
| it glosses over some of the more outrageous history of the
| industry (Standard Oil providing critical airplane fuel for the
| Nazi invasion of Poland, and also fueling Nazi Uboats until 1942
| when Congress passed the Trading With The Enemy Act).
| paganel wrote:
| Trading between nations that are in open conflict is kind of
| interesting. For example in this case yes, Standard Oil was
| providing the Nazis with fuel, but presumably they were getting
| paid in return and part of that money was funding the US
| Government through taxes paid by Standard Oil, directly of
| indirectly.
|
| There's also the Nazis' pov, of course, for lack of a better
| term. One could say that they were giving money/liquidity (I
| suppose US dollars, not sure on this one) directly to one of
| the enemies they were fighting.
|
| Like I said, these type of examples (which are pretty rare, at
| least to my knowledge) can be pretty interesting if you start
| going into the details.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I really appreciated the named names and real examples.
| Unfortunately, I wasn't able to break free of the insight
| distortion field and see the examples as dumb. I'm the same with
| academese -- as long as I know all of the big words, I feel like
| they've said something intelligible.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Beware of logical sounding narratives in general. They almost
| always miss a variable or four.
| Jensson wrote:
| Which is why you read the comments instead of the article, they
| always find like ten of those four mistakes.
| compressedgas wrote:
| Also the illusion of explanatory depth.
| feoren wrote:
| One reason I almost always read the comments before the article
| on Hacker News is that the comments have less control over the
| narrative, so it's harder to get away with these tricks. People
| also love to write things like "well duh: of course writers
| optimize for attention, that's literally their job!" which, while
| a little bit snotty, helps highlight occurrences of this. By
| reading the top few comments on HN first, I feel like I get a
| good idea of whether an article is worth reading, and if I do
| read it I can go in "armed" to protect against this.
|
| The hard part is forcing myself not to _respond_ to those
| comments until I 've actually read the article myself.
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