Elaborating a Bit

I mentioned that the army had a clear path for officer development (command time, staff time, etc).

Despite my concerns about the inevitable waste of such a bureaucratic approach, I do give the army credit for having an actual leadership pipeline.

Same for enlisted soldiers, too.

It's not easy taking a bunch of 18 year olds and turning them into (in a few years) non-commissioned officers.

When I talk about 'wasted talent' it's partly because of what I saw there.

A progression pipeline acknowledges that it takes time and certain kinds of experiences to get the upper level skills a large organization needs... And it ensures effort is put into making sure people get that.

Now that I've worked in the civilian world, I can say that it's not something done as much there (though most companies do try to provide some sort of option for people to progress. It's just more likely to be paying for school or certifications)

And then some try to poach the ones who've gone through such a pipeline elsewhere, and then complain about a talent shortage. 

Circling Back as Promised - Incomplete

"The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way."

 Okay, perhaps I'm not really talking about the Tao, but it captures the difficulty I've had in writing this.

I do have some ideas I wanted to address, circling back to my previous post. Alas, every time I mentally started to write it, I would come up with something completely different.

...Not wrong, just starting points that would take the post in completely different directions. None of which felt quite right.

And it all fails to capture what I really wanted to address. So I started thinking about that, in particular. If I had to pick one thing, what would I address?

And it's not the relationship between freedom and property rights (the book that started this posits there is one, and looks at some of the debates between colonials and the original American inhabitants. I have to admit I have a hard time grasping their points, though I think it's because I'm so steeped in my own culture that it's hard to imagine another one. Native Americans had wealthy people, but somehow the wealth didn't translate into power over others the way ours does? Women handled the land and farming? But then... how did those women decide who got what? I'm not really sure I get how it worked. It does seem appealing though - and their shock at the callousness of colonial society is a bit of a wake up call. Like... maybe we don't have to have a wealthy 1% that callously ignores the suffering of the rest of society.)

I just rambled on about that even though I said it wasn't about freedom and property rights, but that's mostly because I want to think more deeply on it. After all, I don't think you can ever build a 'perfect' system, and most systems rely on a certain amount of wisdom that prevents its flaws from destroying it. But I do think some systems are... better. You can study the effects of specific types of political systems without realizing that the rules of the system do shape the end result. Like how 'first past the post' elections in a winner-takes-all environment allows someone with 35% of the vote to win, simply because they got the largest share. Or how that pushes us towards this terrible two party system where we are constantly forced to choose the lesser of two evils. (I do like the idea of mixed member proportional representation, but I would take ranked choice voting as an improvement... and I get tired of how certain parties keep arguing against policies, not because it's actually better for society, but because they're afraid that they'll lose if they actually had to win the support of the majority. Really a sign of a flawed ideology, but they'd rather dismantle democracy than admit their ideas suck.)

No...  what I really wanted to talk about was the system. 

About why so many people feel isolated, helpless, and lost. About why middle-aged men have such a high suicide rate. About what drives mass shootings. About all the signs that indicate our system is... perhaps broken.

Much of which is based on my own speculation, rules of thumb, and subjective observation. I won't be pulling out a lot of scientific studies to back this up.

To start with...

To start with, I want to share some of my own personal goals. I'm not so keen on competing against other people, don't really care about dominating at some activity.... I'm much more internally driven.

I want to be the best 'me' possible. The old Army slogan to "be all that you can be" honestly appealed to me.

The frustrating thing is that I can tell I have talent. Maybe that's arrogant? Idk... 

The first thing most people say when they describe me is 'smart'. Or 'intelligent'. I've constantly been in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. I am normally one of the smartest people in the room. Even now, as a DevOps engineer dealing with all sorts of tech. (I once solved an issue the offshore team had been struggling with in just a couple of minutes, mostly because they were trying the wrong command and I had experience with and knew the right one, but it was apparently rather memorable.)

And yet despite that, I feel like I have struggled to get where I want to be in life. 

I am now on my third career. Army officer, shipping supervisor... DevOps/Software Engineer/Whatever-label-you-want-for-this-tech-related-job.

I have been thinking about that quite a bit, because my current job is... okay I guess? Interesting enough, and I'm doing well enough, but it's honestly not what I had pictured myself doing. And it has none of the sense of service I had wanted... not like I had hoped to get if I could get into computer security.

But I'm also older now, and it gets harder to keep changing things up. To try to get where I want to be.

So where is it that I want to be? 

Well, that has changed over the years. Quite a bit sometimes. But much of it has been about trying to use that talent in constructive ways. Like... I enjoy asking just the right question that spurs a team discussion that leads to a well thought out solution. 

Does it actually matter whether that discussion is about how best to provide room and board for a unit from Alaska that's coming to our base for training, or what might be causing a problem with our application, or how best to assign our people so that we can handle that days number of shipments?

Not really.

I just like problem solving, and being part of a team that works well together to solve those problems, and ideally those problems would be 'wicked' problems that deal with complicated issues that can have a great impact on people's lives.

Well, okay... I like problem solving, but pontificating on it from my keyboard when there's no chance of it getting put into action isn't satisfactory either...

So there's also an element of difference making, which ultimately requires power of some sort.

In which I am sadly lacking. Or rather, I think I earn the respect of my co-workers and can generally make a difference, to some degree. Often not to the degree I would like... though I am well aware that most people could probably say the same. (also, I think there have to be limits on what you're willing to do for power, so I'm not sure if I just have never been willing to do the things it requires to get that power, or whether I've truly been shut out for all the systemic reasons I often feel like it is.)

It's more than that, too, though.

It's that I constantly feel forced to choose sub-optimal options because that's just how the system is. Like the Army... I get that in order to manage a large organization like that you need a method of assigning personnel. That you need to have your development pipeline, since it's not like you can hire generals off the street. And, naturally, there are some jobs that everyone wants and others that nobody does...

So in some ways it's inevitable that you will get assigned where the Army wants you, and not where you want to be.

But I also, personally, felt like it was such a damn waste.

Like... okay, it does make sense to expect officers to go through a certain career path. You have to be a platoon leader, then a company XO. You should alternate between staff and command positions, so you get experience in both. 

At the same time... I never cared for or wanted to be a general, and it was very annoying to get told I couldn't do the things I actually wanted to because I had to follow this pre-built plan the Army had designed for officers like myself. 

I had this feeling I could have been fantastic in human intelligence. Or even civil affairs. They fit my interests, I thought I had potential... but those things never fit with the Army's need. And then I was assigned to fill out a National Guard position for a deployment to Iraq - which was fine, everyone expected to deploy there at some point then - but it was for one of the most useless positions imaginable. As in, they were restructuring the way military intelligence worked and while our analysts were kept busy supporting the brigade, most of our military intelligence battalion staff was wasted. It's been almost two decades now so I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly anymore, but basically they were restructuring to put military intelligence assets closer to the company level, instead of battalion. Which meant no longer having a military intelligence battalion supporting a brigade. And yet we were still assigned to that MI BN. The analysts at the brigade level didn't need our specific battalion supporting them, and they kept pulling our people for other assignments because of that. 

Like, I don't mind serving or taking some risks... but don't waste me!!! Especially when that position meant I wasn't able to fill some of those other career progression requirements so that I could try transferring into the fields I wanted.

This is the kind of frustration I have felt often in life. And also heard from others...

Underutilization.

Wasted potential.

Wasted talent.

People are capable of doing so much more, and yet somehow only a few ever get the chance to do so.

I think, sometimes, that the people I have worked with... the solders, the workers at that shipping facility, the ones society somehow thinks should barely get paid, and that people up top will confidently assert are just being paid as the market demands...

I think they should get paid more, simply because every single one of them is capable of a lot more. And they are giving up on that potential in order to work these necessary yet often boring or physically demanding jobs. (Automation would be fine if we no longer needed people to do boring tasks that few would want, but only if we build a society where people can find alternatives... and unfortunately this system doesn't seem willing to put the effort into doing so.)

I wanted to circle back to that quote about human happiness, and about what way of living is best, for a couple of reasons.

One is that I have been pondering the appeal of the LitRPG books I've been plowing through, most of which fall into two categories - a transmigration/isekai story where someone from Earth winds up in a fantasy world with magic and a gamelike system where you can level up, and a 'system integration' type story where Earth is integrated into a gamelike system with levels (and either magic or sufficiently advanced tech to be a lot like magic).

Both scenarios have ordinary people who, through access to such a system, are able to level up and become powerful. There are some problems with them (as with any fantasy, people always imagine themselves the winners. And it's fun to think of what you would do if you're the most powerful person around... but that's about on par with fantasizing about medieval times because you always imagine who you could be if you were an aristocrat, and completely ignore the painful reality of that era for peasants and serfs and the like. Also, what's an exciting adventure in fiction would be an all too terrifying life in reality.)

I think the appeal is two-fold. First, that you can make a difference. Second, the relationships and friendships.

Because all too often modern society makes us feel like faceless cogs in the economic machine, and we're so caught up in the machine that it's hard to form meaningful relationships.

Let's Circle Back to This...

Jotting this down because I want to come back to it:

"This ultimately comes down to the question of how to measure human happiness, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do. About the only dependable way anyone has ever discovered to determine whether one way of living is really more satisfying, fulfilling, happy or otherwise preferable to any other is to allow people to fully experience both, give them a choice, then watch what they actually do. For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety."

And Yes - What if We Did?

"What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?"

From The Dawn of Everything 

My People

I had been at loose ends regarding what to read next, when I stumbled across mention of this book. 

I just finished the first chapter and - these are my people.

They're asking questions I've asked before (with actual knowledge to back it up!) and some I haven't yet.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the book. 😁

Musings on the Psychology Behind Terrible Decisions

We recently had a couple of days with a noticable haze, and the smell of smoke. It came from the wildfires in Canada (reaching all the way to central Illinois).

Sure, I've heard humans started those fires... But fires don't catch like that unless the vegetation is dry. This is Canada for crying out loud... I have never seen wildfires in Canada spread smoke so far.

Throw in the heat waves, the insurance companies dropping customers in places like Florida, and it seems like we're really starting to feel the consequences that scientists have been predicting for a while now.

Which makes me think about how we got here. And about the organized efforts to prevent 7s from doing anything about it. (Like this).

It's pretty common for people to dismiss these things as 'greed', or corporations (and billionaires) being just plain evil...

And maybe it's true. I mean, we do have story after story of corporations suppressing information that can be life threatening. Radium girls, cigarette companies, Erin Brockovich - that's just a small fraction of the multitude of examples. If anyone wonders why 'evil corporations' are a constant trope, they haven't really been paying attention to what corporations have proven they're willing to do. If you add in less immediately lethal activity (like Volkswagen's emissions scandal) the list grows even longer. 

Is greed and evil really enough of an explanation though?

I mean sure, maybe some of the people involved are knowingly choosing to do wrong for short sighted gain or something, who knows?

But with my personal rules of thumb (most people don't want to think of themselves as evil, so they will have some sort of justification. Plus we tend to be biased when it benefits us, so people are more likely to find arguments credible when they allow them to continue making money.) I suspect there's more going on than simple greed.

More than just human bias, too. After all, some of those corporations clearly did have proof that they were trying to cover up. 

When I try to imagine what would lead me to make such morally bankrupt decisions, I think back to the times when I really, really, didn't want to believe something.

Like realizing I was the one who made a mistake. I think most people, like me, feel an instinctive fear when that happens. Sort of an 'oh shit, I screwed up... This could get me fired' fear. It doesn't even have to be a direct threat from your boss, most people think that if they screw up badly enough they will lose their job. (There was a thread on Twitter once where tech people talked about their biggest, most disastrous mistakes... And it's kind of reassuring to realize so many people - people who mostly seem competent and good - have stories like that. Helps dispel the myth that we all have to be perfect).

It's hard to set aside the ego, to not get defensive and immediately try to shuffle the blame or hide what you did and hope nobody figures it out.

Those are the moments that can define a person, a corporation, a country...

And when we talk about character, we're talking about people who demonstrate it even when your self interest is telling you to hide and cover up whatever it is.

I don't know that that makes any difference - we still have short sighted fools preventing us from addressing problems because it's not in their interest.

It's just their possible motivations change. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl

The newest Dungeon Crawler Carl book came out, and of course I had to reread all the other books so that I didn't spend the first few chapters trying to remember the details of who is who, or what happened if they reference earlier events.

I am in awe of the storytelling, even more so after this book. I'm not sure how to explain it, I don't think I'd enjoy a similar book with less talentee writing (it doesn't shy from the grotesque and disturbing, imho. It's hard to imagine how a TV or movie could hold true to the story without either sanitizing it or having quite a lot of gore and violence) but I don't really think it's grimdark, despite my initial impressions.

There's hope, especially as he starts making allies and coordinating his fellow crawlers.

It's more like we have this absolutely terrible system, but you see how many people are caught up in it. They're not necessarily evil.

It also has some excellent moments showing the cognitive dissonance that lets a system like this exist.

He and his cat are popular enough that they're sometimes pulled from the show for interviews and such (kind of like in Hunger Games - if you're popular you're more likely to have a sponsor giving you loot that can really help you survive), and during one such show a side character was killed. All the other people on the show were expressing their shock and horror, and he's like 'it's terrible when they die, but you're all okay with us dying?'

Or when he learns that the AIs life is protected... But not the crawlers.

There's so many layers to the story - about terrible systems, community action, power dynamics (the AI is obsessed with his feet, which makes things - strange. Like we talk about sexual harassment and power dynamics in the real world, and an artificial intelligence that can make lots of monsters attack you is one hell of a power imbalance), there's his relationship with Donut (the cat, who was given a pet treat that made her intelligent and thus a crawler in her own right), and there's Carl's own backstory, which was slowly played out.

Really, I could write pages about these books.

But I think what I've been dwelling on the most is how part of his path to success is reminding the public that they are people.

Dehumanizing the 'other' has all too often allowed people to tolerate the intolerable. Allows them to brush it aside, or ignore it.

Like the rich people who cared more about Epstein's arrest than the damage he was doing to all those girls.

Same for job losses, healthcare disasters, and all the other things far too many people struggle with.

We may not have an obviously evil Dungeon Crawl, but there are systemic problems that people with power have learned to look away from.

Maybe they tell themselves it's because normal people are lazy, or entitled, or whatever excuse they can come up with to justify blocking any attempt at change... I don't really know what goes through their heads.

I just think any explanation that dehumanizes the vast majority of people (and calling them 'lazy' as a way of dismissing them is one such) is a good indicator that you're not thinking too clearly.

Thought Exercise Commentary

In case it wasn't obvious, yesterday's post was revisualizing the debate between being a big fish in a small pond vs a not-so-big fish in the ocean (though there were flaws with it).

Or rather it's about fear and control.

After all, a billionaire has more money than a millionaire and an entire nation would naturally have more options than a small city. Why wouldn't you choose it?

The millionaire isn't objectively as well off, their only real advantage in that scenario is that they're probably the most powerful person in their area.

(The analogy also shows how wealth is comparative rather than a specific number, but I'd rather keep the focus on fear and control. After all, paying attention to when your decisions are influenced by a desire for control or fear about one possible future can help steer you away from some pretty terrible choices).

Thought Exercise

Would you rather be a millionaire in a small city where you are wealthier than the next five people put together?

Or a billionaire in a nation where you aren't the wealthiest, but you're definitely in the top 1%?

Innovation

I thought I had said enough about the Titan submersible and hubris, and while technically this is a bit of a different topic, I guess I'm not done yet.

The New Yorker just published this article giving some background on the Titan, and I wanted to focus on some of the quotes.

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,”

“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

 

in 2021, Stockton Rush told an interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And I’ve broken some rules to make this.”

All of these quotes seem like something you'd hear from a 'tech bro'.

And here's the thing. The tech bro attitude (move fast and break things) came Silicon Valley and tech where lives are not at risk.

If your code doesn't work and the program crashes, you just lose time. Well, and depending on if you've pushed to production you might lose some customers and some money. 

It's not like civil engineering, where if your bridge is poorly designed it'll fall apart and people will die.

Maybe there's more serious consequences when we start talking about Industrial Control Systems and medical implants, but most of the time tech failures mean the loss of convenience, not life.

Furthermore, this guy seemed to have only superficial knowledge of the challenges involved.

It reminds me of what a character said, trying to teach etiquette and proper behavior to an unwilling student - 'if you're going to break the rules, you should at least understand which rules you're breaking.'

This guy seems to think simply breaking rules proves he's innovating, rather than knowing which rules his innovations allow him to break.

Overall he comes across as a boy pretending he's a man, which I suppose is part of the whole tech bro think. (That's why they're 'bros')

Finally, he reminds me of a terrible commander I worked under as a young lieutenant. The kind that has learned to basically pressure their underlings to get results...

And doesn't care about what sorts of shortcuts or illegal behavior their subordinates do to meet their goals.

Like... Some pressure is fine? But you don't want to create a team that goes too far, and how do you know when it's too far?

People perform at their peak when they're challenged, but if the challenge is too much (or impossible) it does more harm 5yan good. That's why there are so many studies on how to coach athletes to their peak potential.

You don't make someone start long distance running with a marathon, you build up to it.

These guys only seem to know half of the puzzle.

It's a shame their attitude is so pernicious. 

Current Events

I've thought about writing a bit... And wind up thinking 'why bother? '

I don't want to admit that, or give in to defeatism and cynicism, but it's hard to feel like anything I say will affect the people who I think need to hear it. 

Why would they care about my opinion anyway? 

Besides, I've written plenty on groupthink, decision making, etc.

I try not to assume the worst of the powers that be, but it does seem like too many of them are like that Titanic submarine guy - so arrogantly certain they know better, and so unwilling to hear anything that doesn't support what they want to hear.

Which, well... At least the submarine guy only hurt himself and the others who chose to join him. Unfortunately, for issues like the environment or economics or the threats to our democracy, we're all stuck dealing with the consequences of their hubris.

It's like we're all on a plane that's about to crash, and the pilots have locked the cabin door and shut out anyone who might be able to pilot the plane into a safe landing.

(Okay, I really hope it's not that bad. And it does seem like some people are still trying to steer us to safety... It's just that there's story after story of people with money who use that money to block any effort at changing course).

Speaking of misusing wealth... How on earth do the Mercers justify bankrolling Alex Jones?

Like, do they not realize funding a guy spreading lies about the death of children makes them... Kind of evil?

Or do they not care about morality?

Or are they so lost to sense and sensibility that they somehow think the ends justify the means? Like... They don't want gun control, but rather than admit they're okay with regular school shootings because they think gun rights are more important, they'd rather support lies that obfuscate the issue?

And it's not just them, either.

So many people with money and influence seem to have a really warped world view that prevents them from making sound decisions.

It's hard to feel like things will get better when there's that level of poor judgement.