This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's not just government. Lots of orgs have tried to replace expertise / experience / competency with process and procedure.
You can sometimes see how well this works in practice. It's like when you've a cashier that can't make change and you try to give them 2¢ so you get $1 and not 98¢ in change.
It’s a way to get away with using less skilled workers and cheaper and faster training. Properly training someone to handle a disaster would require the person to have some understanding of what kinds of things happen in disasters to various common systems that run society. You’d have to show them what happens to electrical grids in hurricanes, the issues involved in fixing them, and what upstream and downstream effects might be. This requires at least a basic understanding of electrical engineering. Which takes a lot of intelligence and skill to understand. It’s full of math and physics, after all. Even getting someone to understand the system as well as a journeyman electrician is going to take some time and money. It will help them understand things like why an app is a bad way to distribute aid in a hurricane aftermath zone, but you’ll have to pay more to attract a better candidate, and you have to train them. Or you can set up a generic process for every disaster and hope that they’ll be good enough for most disasters even when executed by Jenny a former secretary at a car dealership who has no idea what the issues even are. Before the disaster scenario happens, you’re getting kudos for doing this because Jenny is a pretty cheap hire, and she’s ready to go within a few months instead of years.
It's not just that the employees are less skilled, they're less capable.
Seleting for someone higher skilled may also select for someone capable of stretching. A competent person can be competent in many situations and scenarios with minimal training.
School used to do a better job of selecting for competence, graduation rates were much lower but graduates could pass competency exams.
I’ll definitely agree on the education part. I think honestly the schools are so bad at this point that they’re meaningless. It seems like it started with the end of the Cold War, mostly because we were moving all the factories to other parts of the world. That triggered a crisis as now everyone needed a HS diploma and a bit more if they wanted to have anything like a working class, let alone middle class lifestyle. And since the biggest determinant of getting a “good job” once the factory was gone was education, all barriers to education were systematically eliminated. You can’t be so cruel as to flunk a kid who can’t do the work because if he doesn’t graduate, he’s going to live in poverty and be basically unemployed forever. Then of course you have student loans so everyone could go to college. Of course colleges saw this as a cash cow. Lower the standards so that any kid who graduates high school can “earn” a diploma.
And now you have functionally uneducated college grads who believe they’re smart competent people, but aren’t and probably wouldn’t pass their grandparents freshman year of high school. Try it. Find math problems that a 14 year old in 1920 was expected to be able to solve and give it to a college grad in 2024. They cannot do it. They cannot read books that were read for fun in 1950. Forget such arcane subjects as geography, history, or science. It’s a scary sad thing that people with college degrees know less about science than high school kids in 1980.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is the essence of modern management theory. It can be done, but probably not for disaster recovery or any other task where every situation is significantly different.
The difficulty is the 'decision makers' have often moved on before the pigeons come home to roost.
Even highly repeatable processes will often have edge cases / or odd failure modes that while rare if the process is very frequent will throw errors often enough to cause problems.
Also these jobs tend to suck which presents other challenges.
I'd rather interact with someone competent than an idiot with a checklist. I'm sure there's an appropriate Idiocracy clip.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link