Are the lessons you have distilled applicable to other institutions in society which decline due to corruption? How is corruption different from your concept of financial gravity?
Yes. In the book, I do my best to explain how our current for-profit and non-profit labels don't really make sense, and that therefore these issues are pervasive in society (public/private sector has similar issues, as I discuss in the later chapters).
Corruption = the symptom
Gravity = the force that causes it
In the book, I give the example of a bridge that collapses. If you ask an engineer "why did it collapse" you'll be annoyed if they say "gravity" even though that is technically correct. If we go examine the wreckage and notice that the metal bolts have been corroded beyond recognition, we can start to think through what went wrong and what to do about it going forward.
Only an engineer under severe pressure would snark about gravity to leadership about a bridge collapse, though. A good engineer would challenge the missing context instead. If you ask an engineer “why did it collapse” without the correct statement of context, then of course you’ll get an answer you dislike, because they’re going to (as is human norm) assume their own context rather than the none you provided. Instead, ask better questions. “Are we liable for this collapse?” is usually what I would expect a corporate leader to want answered, and so as a senior engineer I would reply to the context-free question “why did it collapse?” with a context clarification request: “Are you asking about the immediate cause, about the root cause, or about which company should be held accountable?”. There’s nothing quite like watching an exec choke out an admission of interest in legal liability rather than engineering factors after interrupting an engineer working on the collapse who knows full well not to write checks that will get them cashiered :)
What I think is surprising about this article is that I would expect the top HN comment to call out that it's an advertorial for the Turkish hair replacement industry. It's like something you'd usually find on the Yahoo News page - the only reason it seems to have survived on the front page of HN is because it's in Wired and it's got the word hack used inappropriately in both title and body. If I can't rely on HN to sniff out the paid BS, what do I have to do, figure it out myself?
I believe your words should be your own. I refuse to let ai strip my words of their idiosyncrasy. I refuse to put my words into a machine that robs them of their humanity. They are mine, they are me. Working with a human editor is an act of love and creation. Working with an AI editor is an act of mediocrity and sacrificed originality.
Funny, I use this myself, particularly in HN. I think there is a corollary though, which goes something like "Headlines which ask a question are more likely to attract attention when the subject is of interest to the reader." or "Headlines which leave an unclosed loop cause an impulse to find the solution."
Posting this question in a slightly different way than I did before. My theory is that it is possible to deliberately structure an experience within 48 hours or so to create a lifelong bond on a team of 4-5 people. I'm trying to figure out what the elements of that experience would be so I'm using a handy AI tool to help me do the research.
Encounter groups (e.g. "T-Groups") got a bad reputation in the 1970s because they could put people under extreme social pressure.
A few years back (before Ozempic) I'd had an incident where I developed a psychogenic fever after extreme stress which caused me to lose about 15 pounds. (The psychogenic fever is caused by the nervous system activating oxidization of brown fat, which can persist for a few weeks)
I've made some half-hearted attempts since to induce a psychogenic fever including attempts at biofeedback with a thermometer. If I just had some way to measure the tone of the neurons that go to those brown fat cells... Thing is, anything I could expose myself to get extreme stress would be pretty unpleasant, never mind dangerous.
I bet you could cause enough stress by getting 20 people to bully one person in an encounter group over the weekend but that's the kind of experiment you'll never get past the human subject review board.
Yeah, I think what I have in mind is more along the lines of creating a defined goal that people need to achieve in a limited amount of time. Think carrying a sandbag for 20 miles by handing it off between the participants. E.g. pushing themselves physically or mentally, with some time constraints, and helping each other in the process.
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