My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down upon because of their alcohol problem.
Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out of it. He died because he was drunk and after loading a wagon of wood for my grandma he struck his head on the pavement. My father insisted he went to the hospital because he has not feeling well but the guy refused. He died a couple of days later because of brain hemorrhage, in his early 50s.
Another guy in the village, a really helpful fellow, you would never believe it by his appearance or demeanor, but he was a retired secret-service officer and used to brief the president.
A female child development therapist that made a bad impression on myself(she seemed fixated on puzzle solving) was later recommended by others as an expert in her field.
So yes, everybody can have a bad day and its really easy to misjudge someone by their appearance.
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1. The pretentious way that Model U.N. clubs name what’s effectively the president.
E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.
The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".
And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.
So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.
The statement is not intended as an attack against the medical professions or the effectiveness of medicine. It is intended as pointing out my observation that, typically, a doctor would list such iatrogenic causes very low on their list of differentials to consider, preferring to consider 'textbook' causes first. However, my own experience (which, is medical, but admittedly "anecdata") is that at present, iatrogenic causes are very relevant, and at least as likely, if not more, to yield a relevant diagnosis compared to textbook stuff in a high proportion of presentations.
A classic example of this is doctors treating symptoms by adding more medication/treatment options, rarely removing medications/treatments that may be causing those symptoms in the first place. Especially if that medication was started by a different specialist. It usually takes several rounds of inconclusive investigations and experimenting with treatments before altering an existing medication is even considered.
At the very least, having a "exclude iatrogenic causes first, before moving on to 'classic' stuff" is a good mindset to have.
> Furthermore, a patient can suffer from iatrogenic harm even if everything was done correctly, and does not imply that someone didn't "know" something correctly.
There's a popular quote often said to medical students when they start: "50% of what we'll be teaching you will have become obsolete or proven wrong by the time you graduate; unfortunately we don't know which 50%.".
This is tantological- but it has some great depth. I'd like to quote you on this, if I may.
Do you have non-anecdotal evidence for this claim? It sounds rather far-fetched.
> Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity, including diagnosis, intervention, error, or negligence.[1][2][3] First used in this sense in 1924,[1] the term was introduced to sociology in 1976 by Ivan Illich, alleging that industrialized societies impair quality of life by overmedicalizing life.[4] Iatrogenesis may thus include mental suffering via medical beliefs or a practitioner's statements.[4][5][6] Some iatrogenic events are obvious, like amputation of the wrong limb, whereas others, like drug interactions, can evade recognition. In a 2013 estimate, about 20 million negative effects from treatment had occurred globally.[7] In 2013, an estimated 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.[8]
I wanted to know what tpoacher's lived experience and personal observation was to cause him to make the statement.
They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.
OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.
1. Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.
2. Restated: people scale poorly.
3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.
4. We seem to trend the opposite direction from (3).
Whoa there. There are plenty of very small governments that have plenty of flailing and tyranny. In the limit, if government is just one guy, he clearly won't have clue about 99% of what he's doing, and will be extremely easy to corrupt since he has no-one else to hold him accountable.
If you want to have even a chance of having a competent government you need at least three fully independent branches of government with their own internal systems of accountability.
I could just as easily argue that you need to maximize the size of the government.
The problem is you hit issues both at the small and the large end. It's like goldilocks. You shouldn't minimize or maximize. You should aim at just the right size for the country/region you're trying to govern.
What's WAY, WAY more important is HOW you govern.
What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller. I guess so much time has passed since the various parts of our government was set up that we've kind of forgotten why the government is the way it is.
Not that we shouldn't have a process that trims down parts of government that has become redundant. But we should have a deep understanding of the problem that part of the government is solving before doing so.
And what’s really really scary is how many people, at least in the US, worry about government being too small when in reality it has been almost monotonically growing since the 1960s. Non defense federal spending as a share of GDP is bigger than the 1960s. And state and local government spending has grown twice as fast as GDP since 1960.
I think people confuse Reagan’s rhetoric with the reality that Democrats controlled the House, and thus spending bills, his entire presidency. The Reagan era was a period of government retrenchment in the same sense as Biden is the second coming of FDR.
You said "solve". I said "minimize". Details matter, boss.
I've seen about 220 'orgs' from the outside in, interviewed a few thousand people in those orgs and have done the write up on the state of affairs. I've yet to find a single example that would support this claim, where did you get this from?
That seems like a very bold premise to me.
They might be smart, but it has no impact on the quality of their work. Right or wrong, good or bad, non of that has any bearing on how they do their work. They want to get stuff done. Without getting in any political trouble. In a way that can be claimed as a win (if it actually is a win is immaterial).
Yes, and it’s also competing with Estonia at being the best in the world.
One of the things that burned me out was actually the poor decision making, from my technical point of view mind you. I’ll simplify what I mean by a made up example of a platform selection process. Your organisation needs a headless CMS, your external consultants tells you this, your tech staff tells you this and even your friends from competitors that you network with privately tell you this. The issue is that your company strategy is to rely as little on internal IT resources as possible, and any available headless CMS (because you can’t outhouse the data) requires technical talent. So what do you do? Well, you pick something else, like Wordpress, the Microsoft powerplatform or similar, and you do fine. The solution is shit technically, but it also works good enough while achieving its primary strategic goal within your organisation.
Public sector digitalisation is that, except a billion times more complicated and with the added bonus of having changing political leadership. For a few years we had a designated minister in Sophie Løhde, who setup a branch of the digitalisation ministry to build a cross sector national enterprise architecture inspired by the one they run in the municipalities (KL) called rammearkitekturen. The group had an extreme amount of talent and improved on the 20 years of KL work so much it was like the whole thing went from the stoneage to the spaceage in less than a year. Then Sophie Lødhe got a different job, the task force was disbanded and everything related to governance went back to the municipalities (KL and KOMBIT) whom through out the process had suffered from an extreme inability to kill their darlings.
I mean, that’s just a glimpse of it, but you don’t have to work with other European countries for very long until you relive just how awesome digitalisation is in Denmark by comparison. Part of my current job is dealing with the fact that FTP is still a very common data transfer channel in Germany and France, and I didn’t miss that S in SFTP, because that’s something even massive tech companies that shall remain unnamed hadn’t heard about until I asked them why it wasn’t encrypted.
On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.
Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.
Horrible outsourcing deals with the usual suspects and enormous failed programmes are still the default.
This is the country of Alan Turing, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Acorn RISC Machines. We need a new broom on public IT. I think we also need an outright ban on using Microsoft and other Big Tech contracts and a policy to rebuild skills and bring them back in.
One of the most disgraceful episodes of late was the UK basically outsourcing our whole intelligence show to Amazon. Our corrupt minister Priti Patel sold out MI5/6/GCHQ. For over a year she has refused to answer questions on the decision, her connections and kickbacks.
In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-house, the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground engineers) were some of the smartest, most motivated individuals I've worked with, who pretty consistently gave great output (for e.g., shipping products, system design, software architecture, balancing tech debt with delivery velocity) in the face of almost uniformly painful obstacles, like the tooling they could work, or being jerked around by changing political priorities.
OTOH, any time the tech folks were a long-term outsourced arrangement, you could expect to find (WITHOUT EXCEPTION) ridiculous amounts of cruft, hacks and frankly unacceptable shortcuts in the tech systems and interfaces, and the few people of this ilk that I did deal with, were entirely focussed on Goodhart's Law-ing their way to their next gig. (TBH, I can't really blame the individuals as they're merely responding in the most rational manner to their incentives).
> I think we also need [...] a policy to rebuild skills and bring them back in.
Absolutely 100% agreed, but I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite leadership/management abilities to be able to do this in a manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs to politically connected mates.
P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader app that I use.
Lions led by donkeys as they used to say.
> I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite > leadership/management abilities
I'll differ a little here. I think we can have capable people at all levels and I am generally confident in the UK to come through in the end. We can do good leadership too. The reason the donkeys won't carry their load is that they're corrupt, undisciplined and disloyal. They're there to serve us but we forget who holds the stick.
> manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs > to politically connected mates.
Precisely. My guess is Nick Clegg and Priti Patel are the tip of a gargantuan iceberg. We're becoming a vassal state to the third richest "nation state" on Earth [1], because they have our politicians in their pockets.
[1] The combined wealth of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook now places them collectively above Russia as the number three "superpower". https://www.wired.co.uk/article/big-tech-geopolitics
> P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader
Yes, Emacs, Well spotted. Yet another fingerprint to watch for! :)
The government sign huge outsourcing which propose large, expensive, long waterfall style projects with outdated architecture etc.
Time and time again these programmes fail, but the government money just keeps on flowing.
However, Government is like a big corporation with extreme levels of power and corruption in every country. It is also largely unique in that the Prime Minister/President can't just get rid of people they don't like or are not very good at their job, the voters recruited them! So then you balanbce priority, idealism, party politics, saving-face, money, making yourselves look powerful to the world, trade agreements and loads of other things. To be fair, it is remarkable we get anything useful out of it.
That’s “not knowing what you’re doing” and not really different from “fake it until you make it” either.
If you don’t have a really concrete plan to achieve a certain goal, you quite literally don’t know what you’re doing.
That's the gist of all of it. No one knows what are they doing because the adults actually don't have all the answers, on the other hand smart people know what they want to achieve and they have idea and a plan for it and simply try their best. They know what are they doing in the context of their understanding, idea and desires, it's just that their understanding and ideas have limits.
you are complaining about Boris, you have to see here in Spain to Pedro Sanchez, it's a completely mess
Johnson also, with the help of the Queen, unlawfully prorogued (ie ended the session of) parliament in order to avoid democracy acting against him.
He lost two previous jobs for lying (in politics and journalism; you have to try really hard to lose a post for lying in either occupation it seems). Apart from his handlers I can't see how anyone would employ him for any role.
He's very bright, his team manipulate the news/news cycle in similar way to Trump, and it's documented fact that he purposefully plays the fool.
They removed EU oversight and loaded top civil service positions with yes-men.
They've achieved a lot, all to the detriment of the country and regular people. What makes you say they don't know what they're doing?
I worked for an acronym company in which the majority of "leaders" were smart, driven, capable, and despite mistakes that anyone can make, it would have not been fair to call them incompetent.
Some were incompetent, they got promoted into positions of responsibility and power when the company was scaling up so fast that they could not hire externally for those positions fast enough, and the internally vetting was weak. Then, they created their "network of power" within the company and they went on working incompetently for a few years. And then there were people like my former boss who are idiots with an academic title of some weight. Many such cases.
I then worked for a huge company, but not an acronym one, and at the Director/VP/C- level there are pockets of incompetence that are difficult to explain to others and to accept as possible.
CTOs that know little about technology, VPs that ask LinkedIn for surveys of employer retention to make the case that they were not losing more people in a year than, say, Google, but not accounting for the fact that we could not hire anyone for months while Google is so worried about false positives that they reject plenty of very viable candidates. The same slides presented at each all-hands meetings not to reinforce the vision or goals, but because they are too lazy to prepare new slides for an audience of 500 people, who looked at themselves asking: again?
One might say that they are competent at navigating company politics, which is like saying that the employee sleeping with their bosses are competent at getting promotions.
When I worked in academia (not in the US, if that matters), there were plenty of tenured professors that I would say were in the bottom 5 or 10% in terms of competence, research plans, management of students and postdocs, when compared to all postdocs in the same research area. Useless professionals that schemed their way through academia. And everybody knows that, but people who are inside have nothing to gain by exposing them, and people who leave academia they say, well, not my problem anymore, f them.
In my home country, the vast majority of politicians are incompetent outside of their core competence, which is getting votes.
I was under the impression, when I was younger, that I was wrong whenever I saw someone in a position of power, be it in the private sector or public office, who I saw as incompetence. How is it possible, I was asking myself, that somebody can get promoted, assigned huge responsibilities, be accepted by their peers when they are not at their level or at the level of competence required by their position. But it is very possible and in reality quite frequent.
This is blatantly untrue.
Heck, the infamous trifecta Bush-Blair-Aznar led their countries on a war that destroyed a country and costed many human lifes, based on what we know were lies and invented data. What consecuences did they face?
And that's just an example. I can show you as many corruption cases as you want, and see how the subjects go on with their careers untouched.
Until we are front page news for being "naive", "stupid", "arrogant", "monster", we can't really understand the pressure that Governments are under.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.
I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.
A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.