242. The Strange Matter of Job Incompetence

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Thor

Some peo­ple are very good at their jobs. Some jobs are pretty easy to be good at. In my expe­ri­ence, extremely large num­bers of peo­ple are rather bad at their jobs, and a fair num­ber are a down­right men­ace. In fact in some occu­pa­tions, most peo­ple are quite bad at it. For exam­ple, look­ing back ratio­nally with a 66 year score­card, around 80% of the med­ical doc­tors I’ve encoun­tered have been use­less to dan­ger­ous, at least for my needs. As a teacher, it also pains me to say that a very high per­cent­age of teach­ers and lec­tur­ers are inept at best. Why is this so? There seems to be no sim­ple con­nec­tion with intel­li­gence or length of train­ing.  I have heard that truck dri­vers who are too bright are dan­ger­ous (they get bored), or too slow wit­ted, also risky (they can’t make the nec­es­sary quick traf­fic judge­ments).  The most likely fac­tor for wide­spread incom­pe­tence how­ever may be whether indi­vid­ual job tasks vary much. On a pro­duc­tion line, it doesn’t vary, so you want some­one sub­mis­sive with no imag­i­na­tion (and that is what many edu­ca­tion sys­tems aim to pro­duce). In med­i­cine, patients are immensely vari­able, so you want a medico with sci­en­tific curios­ity, alert to the unusual, and who can think out­side of the box when nec­es­sary.  In fact most medicos by char­ac­ter and train­ing seem to act more like tech­ni­cians. They have mem­o­rized a cat­a­logue of pro­ce­dures and apply them to invented “dis­ease” cat­e­gories, regard­less of the patient. Hence their level of fail­ure. Sim­i­larly the vast major­ity of teach­ers (and the insti­tu­tions they work for) fol­low a rigid “cur­ricu­lum” which eval­u­ates stu­dents for their con­for­mity to the plan, regard­less of real per­sonal stu­dent learn­ing. Teach­ers are actu­ally required to do this, on pain of los­ing their jobs. If true teacher pro­duc­tiv­ity is mul­ti­ply­ing stu­dent learn­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, teach­ers are often required to be unpro­duc­tive. Sim­i­larly, many occu­pa­tions require work­ers to be unpro­duc­tive, if pro­duc­tiv­ity means doing a job well. What a strange world.

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241. Sell It!

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Thor

Over two thou­sand years ago, there was a philoso­pher, Laozi, who was sure that peo­ple were nat­u­rally good (some­one called Jesus Christ had the same idea). About the same time another char­ac­ter, Shâng Yâng, reck­oned they were nat­u­rally bad and invented an impres­sive list of pun­ish­ments. Funny, ancient his­tory seems to give us no wise guys who thought that peo­ple were nat­u­rally suck­ers. How did they miss such a deep human truth? Give me a rea­son, any rea­son, that your scam or your wid­get will work and I can sell it. It’s the story that sells, not the balm or the wid­get. (Well, except to a few bor­ing char­ac­ters who actu­ally want facts). Peo­ple always want to believe in some­thing, tai­lored in sim­plic­ity to their intel­li­gence. It just needs Joe Blogs to be given an attrac­tive rea­son and he’ll believe that the moon is made of cheese, so find out what he thinks adds up to an attrac­tive rea­son. Few peo­ple will admit that their own judge­ment is poor. Actu­ally the evi­dence for com­mon bad judge­ment is over­whelm­ing (e.g. exibit A: mar­riage with a 50% national fail­ure rate). How lucky. Since so many indi­vid­u­als make such infal­li­bly bad choices, the mar­ket has no ratio­nal bound­aries. A crooked oper­a­tor can par­ley almost any­thing into a dol­lar. Heck, even an hon­est man can sell fridges to Eski­mos.

(also see http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/aphorism.html for this and other Short­cuts)

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240. Women, Men and Religion

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Thor

Men find secu­rity in phys­i­cal dom­i­nance. With­out that dom­i­nance most men feel sex­u­ally cas­trated. Lack­ing phys­i­cal dom­i­nance (on the whole) women often seek secu­rity in deceit, or fail­ing that, in magic. Magic is broadly expressed as spir­i­tu­al­ity. Magic, sorted as orga­nized self-delu­sion, then bet­ter, a shared delu­sion, is what we call reli­gion. This reli­gious magic is potent stuff for con­trol­ling human beings, since few are dri­ven by impar­tial evi­dence based think­ing. Per­ceiv­ing the power of reli­gious magic, men hijack the for­mula by force and kick women out of the tem­ple. Thus all reli­gions which pro­gress to gov­ern­ing the lives of cit­i­zens are based on male sex­ual inse­cu­rity sanc­ti­fied by the state. [a ref­er­ence: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/secrets-of-divine-women-exposed-20120407-1wi1j.html ]

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239. The Competing Engines of Action: Greed and Benevolence

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Thor

The sales­man and the teacher share much in method and imme­di­ate pur­pose. Both wish to move other human beings to deci­sive action, and in that quest they engage the target’s moti­va­tion. Each how­ever is dri­ven by a dif­fer­ent per­sonal need, and trans­mits quite dif­fer­ent out­comes. The sales­man is (at bot­tom) dri­ven by greed, and seeks to exploit weak­ness. To achieve suc­cess, he encour­ages desire, or even lust in the buyer. The long term out­come of the result­ing “con­sumer cul­ture” – a cul­ti­vated cul­ture of greed, desire and quick grat­i­fi­ca­tion – is a wide­spread feel­ing of empti­ness and dis­con­tent. Lust is never sat­is­fied. The teacher (that is a teacher by nature rather than mere title) is dri­ven by benev­o­lence, and seeks to opti­mise the poten­tials of his stu­dents. To achieve suc­cess, he cul­ti­vates curi­ousity, inquiry and dili­gence in the learner. The long term out­come of the result­ing cul­ture of learn­ing is life­long per­sonal growth, a plea­sure in shar­ing and help­ing, and a strong value in doing things well. Benev­o­lence often, per­haps usu­ally, loses to greed. Why? Greed is urgent, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion of hot desire is a quick burn, and never mind the quick burnout to fol­low. Benif­i­cence is merely warm and endur­ing.

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238. Racism and the Paradoxes of Miscommunicaiton

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Thor

It is an axiom that we will be mis­un­der­stood. “All the world old is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a lit­tle queer” [Robert Owen 1771–1858]. It is chis­elled in stone that our writ­ing will be mis­un­der­stood. In every “lit­er­ate” nation, approx­i­mately 50% of the pop­u­la­tion is not lit­er­ate enough to prop­erly decode a news­pa­per, and in Aus­tralia appar­ently only about 16% of peo­ple can com­pare the ideas in two news­pa­per edi­to­ri­als. There­fore, if the topic is con­tro­ver­sial, mil­lions are guar­an­teed NOT to decode the writer’s mean­ing, but to insert their own pre­con­cep­tions. Given all this, per­haps what fol­lows is not sur­pris­ing:
Con­tinue read­ing →

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237. What is a Civilization?

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Thor

A civ­i­liza­tion is a shared sys­tem of val­ues. To those not shar­ing the par­tic­u­lar val­ues, that civ­i­liza­tion may appear defi­cient, even unciv­i­lized. Then we have a clash of civ­i­liza­tions. Inter­na­tional agree­ments try to man­age clash­ing civ­i­liza­tions, and mostly rely on armies to back up the deals. How­ever, the main prob­lems with civ­i­liza­tions are inter­nal. Almost always there are large num­bers of peo­ple who pri­vately do not believe in the core val­ues of their civ­i­liza­tion, but pub­licly pre­tend to do so. After all, it is a big ask to have mil­lions of peo­ple with rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent agen­das shar­ing a sys­tem of val­ues. Those who secretly dis­agree with pub­lic val­ues are often amongst the most ambi­tious mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar civ­i­liza­tion, indeed fre­quently its lead­ers. The upshot is a cor­rup­tion of ide­al­ized val­ues by one means or another. Over decades and cen­turies lead­ers will seek to rein­ter­pret pub­lic val­ues. This might be nec­es­sary, for in a chang­ing world old ideas may no longer be prac­ti­cal. Many hid­den changes how­ever will be for the per­sonal advan­tage of lead­ers. A typ­i­cal pat­tern of cor­rupted val­ues might result in, for exam­ple, the degra­da­tion of women, exploit­ing the less lucky, restrict­ing oppor­tu­nity to cer­tain social classes, or the dou­ble-speak abuse of ideas like ‘free­dom’, ‘the peo­ple’, ‘equal­ity’, ‘order’, ‘sub­ver­sion’ … and so on. Past and present it is pretty hard to think of any civ­i­liza­tion, Chris­tian, Islamic, Bud­dhist, Com­mu­nist, Fas­cist, Dic­ta­to­rial, Lib­er­tar­ian, Demo­c­ra­tic, Social­ist, Cap­i­tal­ist, or what­ever, which has remained mostly decent at its polit­i­cal and social core. ‘Decent’ here is defined by the orig­i­nat­ing ideas of right and wrong within each civ­i­liza­tion. Thus all civ­i­liza­tions are unsta­ble, have moral crises, and may fail, though the peo­ple in them ‘go on’. Per­haps they then accept belief in some new model. Each ‘new civ­i­liza­tion’ will also, of course, even­tu­ally be weak­ened by the cor­rup­tion and abuse of its new val­ues. Now think hard and name your own exam­ples.

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236. Eyes Wide Shut, and Energy of the Human Kind

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Thor

What do you see when you see? What do you hear when you hear? Dur­ing World War II the Aus­tralian mil­i­tary com­mand brought some New Guinea vil­lage chiefs to see the city of Bris­bane. Shock and awe? They went home and excit­edly told their coun­try­men about the dif­fer­ent trees and ani­mals. They had noth­ing to say about the sky­scrap­ers and trains. Well, of course. Now take young adults, whom I have spent a 34 year career teach­ing. They come with var­i­ous poses. a) Some are too self involved to notice any­thing; b) Some live for fash­ion and boy/girl approval; c) Some find the world full of laugh­ter and friend­ship; d) Some notice that the world is full of rivals and liars; e) Some notice that there is injus­tice every­where; f) Some feel that ene­mies and dan­ger can­cel out hope for a bet­ter world … and so it goes. But the really inter­est­ing ques­tion is what they do about all this stuff they notice. The short answer, after a some party hero­ics early on, is mostly … not much. At bot­tom many want a sleepy com­fort zone. True energy of the human kind, to move and shake usual “real­ity”, is a very scarce resource.

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