135 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
    1. there are other tipping  points, like for example, lakes. that can flip over from, you  know, oxygen rich, fish rich, clear water lakes into these murky,  algal bloom dominated, anoxic states, dead states, based on nutrient loading  and overfishing, and that is a Oh, not from climate or temperature. Not anything, no, has  nothing to do with climate or temperature, it's just a, mismanagement,

      for - other types of tipping points - not climate but human mismanagement of resources

  2. May 2024
  3. Apr 2024
    1. One transaction at a time would generallynot lead either to much work or muchbusiness, and besides, a transaction cannot always be completedwhile you wait. The consequence is that we arrive at a num-ber of transactions going on simultaneously. When we nowreach the stage of too much work, then we must find waysand means to supplement our energy. Thus we arrive at amultitude of transactions by means of concerted action.

      While using different verbiage, Kaiser is talking about the idea of information overload here and providing the means to tame it by appropriately breaking it up into pieces upon which we might better apply our energies to turn it into something.

  4. Feb 2024
    1. Each operator, though initially hired asa temp, and, in some cases, no more than high-school-educated, isthe survivor of a rigorous two-week training program. (Most hiresdo not make it through training.)

      Observation in 1994 of short term training of high school graduates for specific tasks which seems to hold true of similar customer service reps in 2024 based on anecdotal evidence of a friend who does customer service training.

  5. Oct 2023
  6. Sep 2023
  7. Aug 2023
    1. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

  8. Feb 2023
    1. rank is not an assessment of who has thebest intrinsic properties, but rather a useful consensus view thatprovides rules for how to behave toward others.

      Rank (social or otherwise) can be a signal for predictability from the perspective of consensus views for how to behave towards others with respect to the abilities or values being measured.


      Ranking people for some sort of technical ability may be a better objective measure rather than ranking people on social status which is far less objective from a humanist perspective. In employment situations, individuals are more likely to rely on social and cultural biases and racist tendencies rather than on objective measures with respect to the job at hand. How can we better objectify the actual underlying values over and above the more subjective ones.

  9. Jan 2023
    1. I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge.

      This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... <br /> —Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope@indieweb.social) https://indieweb.social/@Chronotope/109597430733908319 Dec 29, 2022, 06:27 · Mastodon for Android

      Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.

      How is one to balance these sorts of decisions at the center of a company? What role do examples of tastemakers and creatives have in spaces like fashion for this? How about the control exerted by Steve Jobs at Apple in shaping the purchasing decisions of the users vis-a-vis auteur theory? (Or more broadly, how does one retain the idea of a central vision or voice with the creative or business inputs of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others?)

      How can you balance the regression to the mean with potentially cutting edge internal ideas which may give the company a more competitive edge versus the mean?

  10. Dec 2022
    1. Accordingly, poverty acts to reduce overall available bandwidth. It does thisthrough creating greater stress and worries, reduced nutrition, exposure to toxicenvironments, and so on. For example, the constant worry of how to survive ona day-to- day basis acts to reduce bandwidth:Being poor means having less money to buy things, but it also means havingto spend more of one’s bandwidth managing that money. The poor mustmanage sporadic income, juggle expenses, and make difficult trade-offs.Even when the poor are not actually making financial decisions, thesepreoccupations can be distracting. Thinking and fretting about money caneffectively tax bandwidth.23This body of research has demonstrated that it is important to understanddecision- making not only within the socioeconomic context of individuals’lives, but within the psychological context as well.
    2. Human capital consists of those skills and resources that eachof us brings into the labor market. They include the quantity and quality ofeducation we have attained, job training received, acquired skills and experi-ence, aptitudes and abilities, and so on.
  11. Nov 2022
    1. In 1964, after earning four O-levels, including one in art and maths, Eno had developed an interest in art and music and had no interest in a "conventional job".[12]

      When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.

      What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?

    1. Weare on record as holding that unlimited educational opportunity-or, speaking practically, educational opportunity thatis limited only by individual desire, ability, and need-is themost valuable service that society can provide for its members.

      This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

      Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

      How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

    1. I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.

      — Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.

      — Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.


      I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.

  12. Oct 2022
    1. Onesuspected that Paxson's love for his work may have tempted him tolabor too long, and that he established a schedule to protect him-self and the keenness of his mind, to keep himself from his deskinstead of at it, as is some men's purpose.

      Pomeroy suspects that Paxson may have kept to a strict work schedule to keep his mind sharp, but he doesn't propose or suspect that it may have been the case that Paxson's note taking practice was the thing which not only helped to keep his mind sharp, but which allowed him the freedom and flexibility to keep very regular work hours.

    1. I do not like to do empirical work if I can possibly avoidit. It m e a n s a great deal of trouble if one has no staff; if onedoes e m p l o y a staff, then the staff is often more troublethan the work itself. Moreover, they leave as soon as theyhave b e e n trained and made useful.

      Ha!

  13. Sep 2022
    1. Unemployed workers are much more likelyto fall into poverty in countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan,compared with countries such as the Netherlands and Iceland.

      Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

      Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

      What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

    2. Research has also shown that poverty entrances and exits are most oftencaused by changes in employment status and/or financial resources.
    3. The cost of child poverty is not just borne by the poor. When the expenses related tolost productivity, crime, and poor health are added up, it is estimated that child povertycosts the nation between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion per year. This is vastly higherthan the estimated $90 to $111 billion per year it would take to implement a programpackage that would lift half of children out of poverty.

      The savings indicated here is almost a factor of 10! How can we not be doing this?

      Compare with statistics and descriptions from Why Fewer American Children Are Living in Poverty (New York Times, The Daily, 2022-09-26)

    4. Could the maintenance of these mythsactually be useful for particularly powerful constituencies? Does the contin-uation of these myths serve a purpose or function for other segments of theAmerican population? If so, who and what might that be?
    1. Learned right, which means understanding, which meansconnecting in a meaningful way to previous knowledge, informationalmost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be reliably retrieved iftriggered by the right cues.

      Of course this idea of "learned right" sounds a lot like the problems built into "just". He defines it as meaning "understanding" but there's more he's packing into the word. While his vein example is lovely, the bigger issue is contextualizing everything all the time, which is something that commonly isn't done or even done well over time by educators. This work takes time and effort to help students do this as they're not doing it for themselves until much later in life.

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  14. Aug 2022
    1. Even though I’m an amateur researcherMeaning I do it as part of my job as a designer and writer, but in a rather a naive way compared to anyone writing a PhD., I still spend a good chunk of time hunting down and reading academic publications.

      One really oughtn't downplay their research skills like this, rather they should wear them as a badge of honor. Downplaying them leeches away one's power.

      Ph.D. researchers may potentially go deeper into sources, but this is only a function of time and available attention.

      This sort of debate also plays out in spaces like writing computer code. The broader industry determines who is and isn't a "coder", but this is only a means of creating power structures that determine who has power and who doesn't or who is part of the conversation and who isn't.

      Don't let Maggie fool you here, she is definitely part of this conversation.


      What areas of work over time does this pattern of level of experience not apply to?

      There is definitely a level of minimal literacy at which one could be considered a reader, but there is no distinction between amateur reader and professional reader the way there might be between an "amateur researcher" and a full time "academic researcher".

      Other examples of this? Video game playing?

  15. Jul 2022
    1. that you know was not connected to any kind of military application there were other examples of this and this is something that you could actually put you know 00:07:36 these cards in a smaller deck that you could review i drove to my conference so it would have been a lot harder to review these when i'm driving however if you're flying or taking a train or you 00:07:49 know something where a passenger seat you could potentially just take these cars make a small deck and carry them with you wouldn't need a computer or anything now that was the priming piece 00:08:03 how did it help next step is i actually went to the agenda into the schedule and looked at it typically when you do that there are some some talks that you're going to want to 00:08:16 go to right and some work groups or tracks that are that have a large application to what you're doing your day job is the other piece is if you're presenting

      This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

    1. Their value lies intheir diversity - companies exploit the fact that thesepeople make different sense of the same phenomenaand therefore respond in diverse ways.

      Humans make sense of information in different ways and as a result respond to it and their environments in diverse manners, a fact from which companies can derive direct value.


      This idea is becoming more commonplace now, but here it is in print in 1994. Are there earlier versions of this in the literature?

    1. Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and learned about what he calls Symphonic Thinking, or the ability to find connections between seemingly disparate entities, as a key thinking pattern for the future of work,

      Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind lays out an idea he call's "Symphonic Thinking" which is a practice of finding connections between unrelated ideas. He suggests that this practice is an important key to the future of work.


      Link this to other incarnations of this pattern in history: - Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts - Niklas Luhmann - linked zettelkasten - Marshall Kirkpatrick - triangle thinking - Dan Pink - symphonic thinking - etc...


      Dan Pink A Whole New Mind #books/wanttoread

  16. Jun 2022
    1. The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.

      Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

      How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

    2. you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.
    1. My methodological approach comes from thinking along with Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint. By “complaint”, I mean grievances we lodge within our workplaces, which can look both like formal complaints made to human resources (excuse me, I mean “people operations”) and informal complaints which we hold between our peers, comrades, and friends. Anyone who has engaged in the process of a formal complaint can tell you how exhausting it is to register one, how management and decision-makers can stall, and how much one has to relive their trauma to do so.
    1. The inequalities in the US arise from huge disparities in the resources at school, and a highly unequal society at large. I personally think that improving education is much more about support for students, resources, tutoring, teacher training, etc, than whether we teach logarithms using method X or method Y.
  17. May 2022
    1. As the information tide receded, I started to gain a sense ofconfidence in my ability to find exactly what I needed when I neededit. I became the go-to person in the office for finding that one file, orunearthing that one fact, or remembering exactly what the client hadsaid three weeks earlier. You know the feeling of satisfaction whenyou are the only one in the room who remembers an importantdetail? That feeling became the prize in my personal pursuit tocapitalize on the value of what I knew.

      I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

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  18. Apr 2022
    1. I think we are obsessed with speed to our own detriment, and there is a lot of joy and meaning in learning to appreciate slowness, or phenomenon that may not be clearly measurable.

      —Winnie Lim

    2. Speed comes at a cost. The visibility of the cost is often delayed, and sometimes the awareness of it arrives too late.

      If speed comes at a cost, then one should be cautious when working on ideas around productivity. When does one become too productive? Be sure to create some balance in your processes.

      Amazon warehouses optimize for worker productivity, but this comes at the expense burning out the workforce. If the CEO and senior executives couldn't or work at a similar pace for weeks on end, then they should be loathe to force their low paid workforce to do the same.

  19. Mar 2022
    1. Finding relevant information and understanding it well enough to integrate it into existing knowledge requires intense commitment and concentration.
    2. Users who expe rience empowering designs that are comprehensible, predictable, and controllable, may be inspired to pursue quality in their work products.

      This sounds a lot like the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming who encouraged managers to empower workers to take ownership of their craft and work.

    1. becoming a talent magnet will be challenging for many family businesses. Those that succeed will be rewarded with loyal and highly capable employees who are ready to help the business achieve its aspirations for growth and profitability.
  20. Feb 2022
    1. “Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextualinterference, and using tests, rather than presentations, as learningevents, all share the property that they appear during the learningprocess to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning asmeasured by post-training tests of retention and transfer. Conversely,manipulations such as keeping conditions constant and predictable andmassing trials on a given task often appear to enhance the rate oflearning during instruction or training, but then typically fail to supportlong-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, 2011, 8).

      This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.

      Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?

    2. Willpower is, as far as weknow today,[2] a limited resource that depletes quickly and is alsonot that much up for improvement over the long term (Baumeister,Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice, 1998; Muraven, Tice, andBaumeister, 1998; Schmeichel, Vohs, and Baumeister, 2003; Moller,2006).

      Willpower is a limited resource which depletes quickly and isn't something that can be improved with deliberate work or exercise.

  21. Jan 2022
    1. And contrary to that science-denying slogan of Margaret Thatcher’s, that “there is no such thing as society,” no human has ever survived or thrived without a tribe or society.

      Is this a general feature of the conservative far right of constantly denying our humanity and care for each other?

    1. “It was kind of fun. Like even though I was green, that doesn’t mean my green tops your yellow right? Whatever I did, I just did it with a lot of energy.”

      There's been a normalization of providing exterior indicators of internal ideas and people's mental states. Examples include pins indicating pronouns, arm bracelets indicating social distancing or other social norms.

      But why aren't we taking these even farther on the anthropological spectrum? Is one society better or worse than another? One religion, one culture? Certainly not. Just like Leah McGowen-Hare's green band indicating that she's a hugger isn't any more valuable than someone else's yellow fist bump indicator. We need to do a better job of not putting people into linear relationships which only exist in our minds until we realize how horrific and dehumanizing they are.


      Cross reference:

    1. You live only until an objection scares the people whose job is more and more to avoid objections — that new, primary executive function.

      Are there other examples of this job function in the broader American culture? What do these job descriptions and titles look like?

  22. Dec 2021
    1. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savageones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero washerself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, sheinsisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest ofus.

      This is an interesting starting point for discussing the ills of comparative anthropology which will tend to put one culture or society over another in some sort of linear way and an expectation of equivalence relations (in a mathematical sense).

      Humans and their societies and cultures aren't always reflexive, symmetric, or transitive. There may not be an order relation (aka simple order or linear order) on humanity. We may not have comparability, nonreflexivity, or transitivity.

      (See page 24 on Set Theory and Logic in Topology by James R. Munkres for definition of "order relation")

    2. ‘Security’ takes manyforms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smallerchance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security ofknowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if oneis.
    3. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if wetreat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playfulcreatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead oftelling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state ofequality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptualshackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility ofreinventing ourselves?
    1. Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”

      An interesting take on creative work by Jeremy Strong

  23. Nov 2021
    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

      Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

      Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

      Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

      People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

      The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

      Southernization of the Church

      Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

      Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

    2. Earlier this year, the Christian polling firm Barna Group found that 29 percent of pastors said they had given “real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year.” David Kinnaman, president of Barna, described the past year as a “crucible” for pastors as churches fragmented.

      What part does The Great Resignation have in part of this? Any? Is there overlap for any of the reasons that others are resigning?

      What about the overlap of causes/reasons for teachers leaving the profession since the pandemic? What effect does the hostile work environment of politics play versus a loss of identity and work schedule during a time period in which closures would have affected schedules?

      What commonalities and differences do all these cases have?

  24. Oct 2021
    1. As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the sameway they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful,ungrateful, dishonest. . . .”

      Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MBaFL7sCb8

      Passion is a terrible yardstick for life.

      You create life by living it.

      "Do not loan money to a person following their passion." —Scott Adams advice on being a loan officer

      Passion is where your energy and effort meets someone else's need. —Terri Trespicio

  25. Sep 2021
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ7CyM1Zrqc

      An interesting experiment to change one's schedule this way.

      I feel like I've seen a working schedule infographic of famous writers, artists, etc. and their sample work schedules before. This could certainly fit into that.

      One thing is certain thought, that the time of waking up is probably more a function of the individual person. How you spend your time is another consideration.

      “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” ― Picasso

      “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.” ― Picasso

      Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Picasso

      see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/07/child-art/

    1. n. Dickens saw the emblem of Thomas Gradgrind ("ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to") as the "deadly statistical clock" in his observatory, "which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid". B

      What a great quote to include in the closing!

    2. and McKendrick has shown how Wedgwood wrestled with the problem at Etruria and introduced the first recorded system of clocking-in.87 Bu

      Josiah Wedgwood was apparently the first to institute a system of clocking-into work.

    3. e task. Attention to time in labour depends in large degree upon the need for the synchronization of labour. But in so far as manufacturing industry remained c

      We attend to time in large measure as a need to be able to synchronize our work.

    4. Why look ye, Rogues! D'ye think that this will do ? Your Neighbours thresh as much again as you

      Eternal struggle of competition here. The workers (and the poet) admonish that one compares themselves against their neighbors (competitors) than simply themselves.

      The fix for this is for the leadership/bosses to participate themselves to see if the yield isn't as good as it might otherwise be. So much could be fixed if the "boss" is involved in the actual work or physically on site at least some of the time to experience what is going on. Participation counts.

    1. The Uncomfortable Truth is the Difficult and Unpopular Decisions are Now Unavoidable.

      Topic is relevant across a span of global issues. Natural resources are Finite.....period! Timely decisions are critical to insure intelligent use of resources. DENIAL is the enemy and 800lb gorilla in the room. Neoliberisim and social dysfunction feed on any cognitive dissonance and poop it out as "crap". True believers of American Capitalism (yes there is a difference) have become "cult-like" and drink the fluid of the cult to the very end, human consequence is of no concern.

      Point being: Reality is always elusive within a cult controlled (authoritative) mindset. Cult members are weak sheep, incapable of individual logic/reason. Authority can not be challenged. -- Denial, a human defense mechanism has been and is the common denominator in all personal and global conflict. Denial can be traced throughout modern history and rears its ugly head whenever the stakes are high.

  26. Aug 2021
    1. @dancohen @ayjay, don't forget the noble professions of philosopher's clerk or secretary:

      What it would be like to be a philosopher’s clerk: “It’ll be a matter of filing the generalisations, tidying up paradoxes, laying out the premises before the boss gets in.” —Tom Stoppard

      For five years he [Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)] served as personal secretary to, yes, Francis Bacon. In fact, I’ve noted over a course of years that the job of a secretary can be utterly fulfilling just in case one’s boss happens to be Francis Bacon. —Daniel N. Robinson

      (reply to https://micro.blog/dancohen/11752827)

  27. Jul 2021
    1. https://theamericanscholar.org/blue-collar-brilliance/

      Acknowledging the work and art that blue collar workers do is an important thing.

    2. When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If we think that whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation—are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.
    3. If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will affect the work we create in the future.
    4. Joe learned the most efficient way to use his body by acquiring a set of routines that were quick and preserved energy. Otherwise he would never have survived on the line.

      Sometime in the past six months I ran across a description of how migrant workers do this sort of activity in farming contexts. That article also pointed out the fact that the average person couldn't do this sort of work and that there was extreme value in it.

    5. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in July Check-In · Buttondown (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:19:13</time>)</cite></small>

      Idea of John Paul II's encyclical being a form of blogging in a different era. They're all essays in form, it's just about distribution...

    1. A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.

      This same sort of illusion also occurs in email where we're always assumed to be constantly available to others.

    1. After a good deal of reflection and consultation with my family, I have decided that (aside from pre-existing commitments, of which I have a few) I will no longer give lectures or participate in conferences, whether in person or via video link. I have a great deal that I want to think about and write about, and a dwindling supply of time in which to pursue the tasks I care about most. I understand that this decision might limit sales of my books, and make me even more isolated and ignored than I am already. That’s a trade-off that I simply must make. I feel sure that this is the right thing to do; indeed, the necessary thing to do. I hope that the work I produce in the future will bear out that judgment.

      An interesting take on valuing one's time.

  28. Jun 2021
    1. reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create

      reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create possibilities when they're read in you know its full context um but some of what is happening or some of what the role of the the classroom or the the person is to do is to try to say this is the range of the acceptable response and i feel like as a teacher our role is to kind of say you get to choose how you want to show up but base it in something that's real that's authentic that's not just about you this but it's about the collective so how do we cultivate that connection to collectivity how do we cultivate that ethical uh commitment and conviction to one another but at the end of the day how do we allow young people and everyone really the agency um to decide how they want to like show up—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      This is a powerful teaching philosophy. Return to reflect on this.

    2. a lot of our assessment system our accountability

      a lot of our assessment system our accountability system in education is built around being able to say oh are you on the right path and not acknowledge the multiplicity of paths or in in some ways that the uh the things that are structuring this path is oppressive to our humanity in the first place—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      He very carefully encapsulates a lot of the issues we've got in modern education here. Should we worry about the "standards" like memorizing and correctly using a semicolon over acknowledging our humanity and removing focus from eudaimonia?

    3. when i was in high school just a high school in chester pennsylvania there was like english class there was also like a card game that was happening in the back of the room

      when i was in high school just a high school in chester pennsylvania there was like english class there was also like a card game that was happening in the back of the room and no one like asked those students what they were teaching in that card game because we were like supposed to be doing worksheets in english class but that's also an intellectual practice so like ...—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      I love the idea of this parable of a card game in an English class.

      Moral: Don't marginalize the card game in preference for the supposed main topic as it has its own power and value, and may in fact be more valuable to the participants and their lives than the "main conversation". Value the thing for itself and not for some perceived other thing. View it in a positive framing rather than in a negative one. Simultaneously, don't attempt to subvert it either to reframe or re-capture the topic. Let it be what it is.

    4. that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening

      you could kind of go deeper with that is um do the work of like fred moten and stephanos harney's uh black study or radical study in in the undercommons of of this idea of like um there are these molds intellectual practice you know that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

      He's talking about work (scholarship) that may sit outside the mainstream that for one reason or another aren't recognized (in this case, because the scholars are marginalized in a culture mired in racist ideas, colonialism, etc.). At it's roots, it doesn't necessarily make the work any more or less valuable than that in

      cf. with the academic samizdat of Vladimir Bukovsky who was working under a repressive Russian government

      cf similarly with the work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

      Consensus can very often only be consensus until it isn't.

      How do these ideas interoperate with those of power (power over and power with)? One groups power over another definitely doesn't make them right (or just) at the end of the day.

      I like the word "undercommons", which could be thought of not in a marginalizing way, but in the way of a different (and possibly better) perspective.

    1. You have to be right that the best society is one where people get ahead by being good at things that are worth doing.

      Quote from Daniel Markovitz

      This does raise the point of whether or not some of the things elites are doing is actually good or productive for society. Many are only working at privatizing profits and socializing losses which can be phenomenally caustic to society as well.

    2. Meritocracy harms the elite as well. Life for the meritocratic elite is dominated by work. Substantial numbers of elites report that their work interferes with their health, prevents them from forming strong relationships with their children, gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses, and even makes it harder to have a satisfying sex life.
    3. A Harvard Business Review survey found that 62 percent of high-earning individuals work over 50 hours a week, more than a third work over 60 hours a week, and one in 10 work over 80 hours a week. According to Markovits, elites today work an average of 12 more hours per week than middle-class workers (the equivalent of 1.5 additional workdays).

      This may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?

      Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?

      What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?

      There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:

      Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.

  29. May 2021
    1. So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms—as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market—we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.
    2. It occurs to me that the Clubhouse management actually cares very little about the long-term fates of these kids.

      Twas ever thus in corporate America

    1. Prominence as a critic tends to reinforce itself. The person who appears on news shows is the person who gets to star in a documentary is the person who gets to testify before the Senate is the person who gets invited back onto the news shows, and so forth.

      Another specific example of this has been noted by Zeynep Tufekci of an economist becoming the face of criticism of the education space being open or closed during the coronavirus pandemic. The woman, who had no background in public health or epidemiology, became the public face of the argument about whether schools should be open or closed.

    2. Which brings us back, once again, to the question with which we began: why does it matter who gets to be seen as a prominent “tech critic”? The answer is that it matters because such individuals get to set the bounds for the discussion.

      The ability to set the bounds of the discussion or the problem is a classical example of "power-over" instead of power-with or power-to.

    1. The problem with US Big Tech is bigger, deeper – iceberg-dimensioned, you might say – and not even remotely blockchain-sized or shaped. Leslie Daigle has described the consolidation of the entire Internet stack under the hierarchical and totalizing business models of US tech firms as “climate change for the Internet’. If we don’t fix it, I personally do not believe we will be able to fix much else. That’s why my life’s work is helping to fix it. And by fix, I mean destroy.

      I want this career!

    1. One of the major problems that underlies our society is that the police represent power-over when what we really need is power-with or power-to.

    2. the three types of power commonly discussed in management theory: power-over, power-with, and power-to. These three types of power were first identified by the Mother of Modern Management, Mary Parker Follett. You may also recognize her as the person who coined the term “win-win.” Here are the three types of power: Power-over is extractive. Power-over is extracted from other people, the natural world, etc. Power-over means getting more of the pie. Power-with is gained when we work together, i.e, collective action. Power-to is generative. Power-to is the power we have to create new things. Power-to means making the pie bigger. 

      An interesting break down of power.

  30. Apr 2021
  31. Jan 2021
    1. For example, the notion of the workplace as a family is a refrain in offices but it is most explicit for nannies.

      Too often corporations use the idea that the workplace is a "family", but when times get tough, we don't abandon our families the same way that corporations will summarily fire their employees to try to survive themselves without any real thought about their supposed "family members".

    2. the British designer and social campaigner William Morris pitched “three hopes” about work: “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself”.
    3. The idea of self-sacrifice, and that you should put your clients, your patients or your students before yourself, Ms Jaffe says, “gets laid on very thick [with] teachers or nurses”.

      We need to restructure how we interact with work. There's a definite bias against/toward some careers that isn't levied against other. No one ever says that Wall Street investors should put others before themselves.

    4. “Work is supposed to bring us fulfilment, pleasure, meaning, even joy,” writes Sarah Jaffe in her book, Work Won’t Love You Back. “The admonishment of a thousand inspirational social media posts to ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’ has become folk wisdom,” she continues. Such platitudes suggest an essential truth “stretching back to our caveperson ancestors”. But these fallacies create “stress, anxiety and loneliness”. In short, the “labour of love . . . is a con”.

      Work is not going to love you back and we've been lied to about the idea that we should love our work.

    1. a class of businesses models I call “user domestication”. The domestication of users is high on my list of problems plaguing the human race, and is worth a detailed explanation.

      This portends to be an interesting concept: user domestication

  32. Dec 2020
    1. But being a “culture of yes” had a toxic edge. “In the beginning, that meant you give the socks off your feet to a rider if they forgot their socks,” Rachel explains. “I’ve literally seen people do that. That built that sense of community — ‘We would do anything for you’ — but what that became actually was something sort of abusive internally and externally.”

      Documentation of the problems of yes, but of always yes. Some interesting thought experiments could be done with this.

    2. “Your riders should want to be you or fuck you. That was the mantra,” a former instructor I’ll call Bobby says. “And those two concepts are not mutually exclusive.”

      An odd-sounding, but somehow very American sales mantra.

  33. Oct 2020
    1. Marwick and others have primarily observed intent as a causal condition for microcelebrity and the practice of cultivating it as a set of activities as opposed to the institutional conditions of those activities and microcelebrity’s various effects. Microcelebrity can be a tool to develop a personal brand, to leverage attention to generate income of job prospects, and to distill media and public attention of social movements. I consider microcelebrity’s cause-and-effect from my multiple attenuated status positions. My agency to create, perform or strategically reveal information is circumscribed by my ascribed status positions. As my professional and public-facing identities shift, my social location remains embedded in groups with a “shared histories based on their shared location in relations of power” (Hill Collins 1997: 376). Academic capitalism and microcelebrity promote neoliberal ideas of individualism. But power relations circumscribe the utility and value of cultivating attention in ways we rarely note, much less redress.

      I read this and can't help but thinking about some of my own personal workplace experiences (as well as some of those of others). Many often experience the need to move from an early workplace to another as a means of better experiencing direct promotion, both in status and in respect as well as in pay naturally. One will often encounter issues in promotion at the same company, particularly when it doesn't properly value work and experience, and thinks of you as when you first started work as a young kid still wet behind the ears. Compare this to moving to a new company with a new social group who doesn't know the "old" you, but automatically ascribes to you the rank and value of your new post instead of your past rank(s).

      In some sense making one's old writing/work private (or deleting it on Twitter as is more commonly done for a variety of reasons) becomes a means of preventing the new groups of readers or viewers of one's site from seeing the older, less experienced version of one's self and thereby forcing them to judge you by the "new" you imbued with more authority than the younger tyro of the "old" you.

  34. Sep 2020
    1. Lacking the free time of the hippies, work itself ho become the main route to self-fulfilment for much of the,virtual class'.

      They're right that overwork and identification with work has become all too prevalent over the past several decades.

    1. They believe an unidentified person or entity is acting as an intermediary between Amazon and the drivers and charging drivers to secure more routes, which is against Amazon’s policies.

      Surely this would be the case as someone would potentially need to watch the phones in the tree to ensure they aren't stolen. That may represent a larger cost in potential loss that the potential gain.

    1. Yet there are many good reasons to revisit our working culture, not the least of which being that for most people work brings few rewards beyond a payslip. As the pollster Gallup showed in its momentous survey of working life in 155 countries published in 2017, only one in 10 western Europeans described themselves as engaged by their jobs. This is perhaps unsurprising. After all, in another survey conducted by YouGov in 2015, 37 per cent of working British adults said their jobs were not making any meaningful contribution to the world.
  35. Aug 2020
    1. But what if there were no name at the top of that résumé? What if all you could see was the information that was relevant to hiring? Welcome to the anonymous résumé.

      anonymous resumes is a great idea if they could be implemented well...

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