Everybody's mileage will vary on this ... I spent a lot of time in the year after I read Paul Graham's essay on "things you can't say", searching for things that I thought matched the criteria he set out, and found a few. But it's not that the words may never cross my lips, I can say these things within some small circle of people, but would definitely not be saying them in public without being prepared for an onslaught of negative attention. Some examples of 'cancel culture' are proof of this. Donald G. McNeil comes to mind.
That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.
"Core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left". Or the conservative right, depending on which side of this divide one happens to stand on. And speaking of Orwell, he was pointing out the doublespeak of the Fascists, not the socialists.
Fascists are the ones who want to manipulate other people to their Fuhrer's will. To do that they must manipulate language. Whereas "socialists" are about the common good, which can only happen through peaceful co-existence, which can only happen though democracy.
Depends of course on which definition of "socialism" you use. Didn't Hitler call his movement socialism as well? But I always associated "socialism" with "being social", which means taking into account other people's benefit as well, instead of trying to overpower them with propaganda and double-speak (and of course, violence).
If the goal is unlimited power to your party, to your leader, it would only make sense to lie to people as much as you can, to mislead them. To double-speak to them. If your goal is peaceful co-existence, then not so much.
And where there's smoke there is fire. Where there's Double-Speak, fascism is not far away.
Ironically Double-Speak succeeds because people are social beings, they really WANT to agree with others.
"Illegal alien" is one of the greatest accomplishments of language engineering and was unambiguously successful.
When the left tries this today it results in equal and opposite backlash and has no effect in terms of policy, winning elections, and that sort of stuff, but it certainly can be a motor that keeps online bubbles bubbling.
I think there is no equivocation or ambiguity here, unless you are me at age 5 asking why aliens have landed in Mexico.
I would hazard that you are underestimating the impact of these rhetorical tactics, but I've not the energy to aggressively litigate and cite this point further.
The effectiveness of these tactics is incredible, it helps people who build an identity around marginalization to always feel marginalized. If they ever won anything it would threaten their whole reason for existence.
Again, I think this is likely seen differently depending on which side of the political spectrum one stands, and what sources of information one attunes to. I agree that both 'racism' and 'gender' have become flash-points for discord, and that one can point to the left as trying to change the definitions. But I can think of other words that the right is equally guilty of attempting to re-define. For example, 'woke' was a term originally rooted in African American communities meaning awareness of systemic injustice, but is now used by the right as pejorative for anything they disagree with. (Including the existence of systemic injustice, sigh.)
I remember reading some time ago that there is a real difficulty running passenger trains and freight trains over the same rails. With freight, you can tolerate bumps at the rail-join points, and freight tends to create such bumps because the heavy loads push the rails slightly out of place. Also, freight routes should be limited to a 2% grade, whereas 4% can be tolerated for the lighter passenger cars. Have these problems been mitigated on the Koralm Railway? Anyone know how?
Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
> When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened.
First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good character!
I think you are right that good character is the core of being a good manager. It’s the core of being a good person. Virtue and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to “happiness” (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it’s been the heart of western philosophy.
I feel like the solution is ultimately going to be some kind of trust-less or low-trust system that ultimately incentivizes every individual to do the right thing, no matter where they might be in the hierarchy. We can't rely on top-down leadership spontaneously getting it right, let alone bottom-up leadership. This is why we need an external system that can incentivize people effectively, while being fully observable, trustable, reproducible, etc.
Thanks for the vulnerability and full marks for self awareness.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened
Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
I think your definition of character is useful, and I tend to agree with Drucker that it's the most important thing, because otherwise a manager will subject to whatever political winds are blowing higher up without any grounding or point of view on what should be pushed back on. On the other hand though, "do[ing] the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself" is easily stated, but in practice is not effective without influence—if you are constantly saying no, you'll quickly be replaced.
The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large scale software development because ground-level expertise really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human communication inherently has limits. I would say most people, and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge they would quickly realize that when they describe that a hundred person org they would get a hundred different interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described 30+ years ago.
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.
I agree that "the right thing" depends on point of view and narrative at hand (the context). And when I quote Drucker and point to character, I see it as the bedrock on which a good manager will stand. But people of good character still need a whole array of other tools to turn them into good managers: Being skillful politicians to navigate the organizational polity, being people who can see the big picture. Having _lots_ of people skills. Having a good grasp of the field of endeavor. An ability to laugh at themselves ...
I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
I thought there was too much ambiguity to several of the challenges:
I gave up after the following exercise:
On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me
Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ...
Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory.
It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.
Failing to understand the basic requirement is not, IMHO, overthinking it.
I will admit, as I reread the question and the hint just now, that I just didn't read carefully the first time through. It's actually pretty clear. Sigh.
People's minds work quite differently ... As evidenced by people that have strong reactions to particular languages (love or hate), or, as another example, people that love or hate syntax coloring in code. (Yes, it gets in the way for some). The fact that the instructions didn't make the problem clear to me is not an overthinking problem on my part. It would be better for me if the problems were expressed in different ways.
When trying to communicate, saying the same thing two different ways is a big step towards helping deal with the variance in people's minds. I wish they'd done that with some of the questions.
Nope, I don't see that. As a therapist, this is a big part of our training. Using it in a business context, there's more emphasis on ideas, whereas in therapy, you do ask people how it makes them feel. Often because people don't know how they feel, and that's important in intimate relationships.
It can land as awkward, un-natural, yeah even 'fake' when it's being used by somebody who is just learning it and is practicing, though after time it will lose those qualities. If people you know are using this on you, they might need to own that they're trying something different to get you into a comfort zone before pressing on.
> Using it in a business context, there's more emphasis on ideas
No. It's a cheap trick to make me trust the interlocutor. Since it's not only cheap but effective, it's entirely my choice whether I submit to it and "open up".
In business the other side is anything but your therapist.
"It's a cheap trick to make me trust the interlocutor".
Hmmm. Different interlocutors can have different intentions. Some are going to have the intention to understand. Echoing what you believe the person said is not a 'cheap trick' when it comes to discussing ideas. I've been on both ends of conversations about singing, engineering and sailing, and one person says "what your saying is this" and the other person says: "No, that's not what I'm saying", with a correction that follows, and the chance for two-way understanding.
A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".
For some "a little friction" is enough. For others, not. I keep less-healthy food treats in a cupboard in my garage, because the friction of walking out to get them is enough to reduce my usage to an acceptable level. Even less healthy treats I don't buy, because the friction of going to the grocery store to get them when I'm craving them is enough.
It's an interesting exercise to think about how this could be engineered to increase the friction.
Fun article, but the example of Hilbert Curve usefulness with hard drives is quickly aging out. SSDs, which are increasingly prevalent, have more-or-less constant access time. There is no equivalent of the seek time or rotational latency that slows down HHD access when successive reads are on different tracks, at different rotational angles.
It wasn’t even really a thing for HDD. There was a broad consensus that it was inefficient for such purposes by the 1990s. If you had random access at all, you could do better.
That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.