Sabotage or standard operating procedure?

From The 16 best ways to sabotage your organization's productivity, from a CIA manual published in 1944 by Richard Feloni. Reads a lot like Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

As summarized by Feloni, the OSS recommended:

Organizations and Conferences

Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable"and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

Managers

In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers.

Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw.

To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.

Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

Employees

Work slowly.

Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can.

Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.

Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

How do these sabotage techniques differ from standard operating procedure in most larger enterprises? It is not entirely clear to me that they do.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most bigoted of us all?

Hmmm. From It’s harder for Clinton supporters to respect Trump backers than vice versa by John Gramlich. The findings represent something of a challenge to Althouse's Rule:

I've said it before, and I must repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule.

Pew finds that Trump supporters find it easier to respect their opponents than do Clinton supporters. Very consistent with Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory.

Progressives are particularly sensitive to the Care foundation, libertarians to the Liberty foundation, and conservatives roughly equally sensitive to all six foundations. According to Haidt, this has significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to a degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally-driven words or behavior as having another basis—at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another. Further research has shown that while members of all ideological camps have difficulty understanding others, conservatives are measurably better at understanding the point of view of progressives than vice versa, presumably because conservatives operate in a six-dimensional moral matrix that contains all of the progressives’ dimensions.

What Pew is finding is that indeed Liberals are more intolerant than Conservatives.

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Which demographic is by far the most intolerant of those with whom they disagree? College educated white women.

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Just anecdotally, that seems to match with the demographics which I see in news clips of campus protests, disruptors at speaking events, letters to the editor, etc. Interesting to see it born out in data.

UPDATE: Reminds me of this earlier post, It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, voting and the inevitability of occasional suboptimal outcomes

This is a very good explanatory video on a topical subject:Voting Paradoxes.

Most people grasp that a straightforward direct democracy has the advantage that the majority always wins, but it also has the disadvantage of the minority always losing – referred to by the founding fathers in the Federalist papers as the tyranny of the majority. It is an important defect which the founding fathers addressed through the combination of a republican structure (National, State, Local) and the divided branches (Executive, Legislative, Judicial) with the hope that the resulting divisions would facilitate compromise among groups.

It has broadly been a successful model but people are always frustrated that it is 1) slow, and 2) produces less than optimal outcomes under particular (usually transient) circumstances. Fair enough criticisms until you begin to examine what are the alternative mechanisms. That is what the video highlights. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem dictates that there is no ranked ordering system that makes logical sense. What you gain in one arena of perceived fairness, you lose as much or more in another.

Our political system is not broken. It is merely demonstrating the strains arising from the reality that if there are multiple choices and everyone’s vote counts, then there is no optimum outcome that always maximizes the greater utility of everyone. All models fail under particular circumstances.

The good thing we have is that our model fails less often than most which sounds like damning with faint praise, but is pretty accurate.

All alternatives that get proposed yield a better outcome for particular circumstances but worse outcomes overall.

Epistemological closure - Atlantic edition

Regardless of your view of the respective candidates, this has to be one of the more spectacular examples of epistemological closure I have seen. Scroll down the responses to see what an opportunity this presented to GIF artists everywhere.

Why is Hillary Clinton so widely loved? https://t.co/06Z1xrt3ee pic.twitter.com/QM6RT4qFAJ

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) November 3, 2016

Click on tweet to see responses.

The association between childhood violence victimization and later cognition is largely noncausal

From The Origins of Cognitive Deficits in Victimized Children: Implications for Neuroscientists and Clinicians by Andrea Danese, et al.

Interesting as a strike against post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

Objective:
Individuals reporting a history of childhood violence victimization have impaired brain function. However, the clinical significance, reproducibility, and causality of these findings are disputed. The authors used data from two large cohort studies to address these research questions directly.

Method:
The authors tested the association between prospectively collected measures of childhood violence victimization and cognitive functions in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood among 2,232 members of the U.K. E-Risk Study and 1,037 members of the New Zealand Dunedin Study who were followed up from birth until ages 18 and 38 years, respectively. Multiple measures of victimization and cognition were used, and comparisons were made of cognitive scores for twins discordant for victimization.

Results:
Individuals exposed to childhood victimization had pervasive impairments in clinically relevant cognitive functions, including general intelligence, executive function, processing speed, memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension in adolescence and adulthood. However, the observed cognitive deficits in victimized individuals were largely explained by cognitive deficits that predated childhood victimization and by confounding genetic and environmental risks.

Conclusions:
Findings from two population-representative birth cohorts totaling more than 3,000 individuals and born 20 years and 20,000 km apart suggest that the association between childhood violence victimization and later cognition is largely noncausal, in contrast to conventional interpretations. These findings support the adoption of a more circumspect approach to causal inference in the neuroscience of stress. Clinically, cognitive deficits should be conceptualized as individual risk factors for victimization as well as potential complicating features during treatment.

The weakest and least capable among us need the most protection and assistance.

I am interested in the description of the biologically gifted, those having "general intelligence, executive function, processing speed, memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension." It answers a need in my model of Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Capability and Motivation as the causal ingredient of outcomes. For Capability, I have been using IQ as a broad proxy but general intelligence, executive function, processing speed, memory, perceptual reasoning, and verbal comprehension is much closer to what I am after.

The Donkey

The Donkey
BY G. K. Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry, Star to faint star, across the sky.

Thank you internet and Wikipedia. From fifteen or so to perhaps twenty-five, I read all or most of the work of John Wyndham, most famous for his science fiction novel, Day of the Triffids.

Among his books is The Outward Urge. Good enough, but it was not a particular favorite of mine. Most of his work was more a fusion of science fiction and speculation in the realms of sociology and psychology. The Outward Urge was more traditional hard science sci-fi.

However, there was a short introductory couplet or dedication of some sort which stuck with me for years. I did not have a copy of the book and it is relatively hard to find. All I was left with was something to do with small gnat voices calling from star to star. I have searched a number of times in the past fifteen years but for the longest time, I came up empty-handed despite the realm of internet data ever expanding. It has, till now, been still too obscure.

However, I just did a search and now have the answer. In fact a couple of answers.

The couplet was:

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.

Beautiful.

I am not sure I ever knew at the time but it is from a Rupert Brooke (another favorite of mine) poem, The Jolly Company.

The Jolly Company
Rupert Brooke

THE stars, a jolly company,
I envied, straying late and lonely;
And cried upon their revelry:
"O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends radiant and inseparable!"
Light-heart and glad they seemed to me
And merry comrades (even so
God out of heaven may laugh to see
The happy crowds; and never know
That in his lone obscure distress
Each walketh in a wilderness).
But I, remembering, pitied well
And loved them, who, with lonely light,
In empty infinite spaces dwell,
Disconsolate. For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.

The tunics, they are a-changin'

From Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The structure of everyday life by Fernand Braudel.

The really big change came in about 1350 with the sudden shortening of men’s costume, which was viewed as scandalous by the old, the prudent, and the defenders of tradition. 'Around that year,' writes the continuer of Guillaume de Nangis's chronicle, "men, in particular noblemen and their squires, and a few bourgeois and their servants, took to wearing tunics so short and tight that they revealed what modesty bids us hide. This was a most astonishing thing for the people.' This figure-hugging costume was to last, and men never went back to wearing long robes. As for women, their bodices too became more close-fitting, and were cut with a large décolleté - another cause for censure.

Shades of the Bob Dylan song which ends with:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts

The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India by Jon Wilson. Technology and transportation are critical to progress but have evolved on independent paths in different places at different times. An insight:

…the most important technological change for the transportation of heavy goods in nineteenth-century India was not the arrival of the quick, expensive railway: it was the move from pack animals to carts pulled by two or four beasts in the first half of the century. This was the process historian Amalendu Guha calls ‘the bullock cart revolution’. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts, but also with human-powered river transport. Rowing boats along the Ganges and Jamuna won a price war with the railways over the cost of transporting heavy goods. Vessels powered by human beings were able to undercut steam vessels elsewhere.

Testify!

Heh.

Biggest misconception in philosophy:
1. Nietzsche was a nihilist
2. Kuhn was anti-science
3. Derrida was worth reading

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) October 18, 2016