People who end up leading successful companies are often able to do so not because they’re more willing to take risks than others, but rather because they have experienced more good luck than others. Take Bill Gates, for example. His parents sent him to an exclusive private school, which afforded him regular access to computers from an early age, giving him valuable experience that most others his age could not access, through no fault of their own. Microsoft was able to make a crucial business deal with IBM because Gates’ mother knew the CEO. Someone else with equal skill and appetite for risk would have found it much more difficult to be as successful as Gates was, because their parents were likely not rich and not connected to the right people.
Luck is always going to play a role. No one has ever said that life is fair, and no system is based on life being fair. One of the many reasons that progressive taxation is justified.
One of the best software design books I've read is "Domain Modelling Made Functional", from Scott Wlaschin.
It's about F#, but it remains a good read for any software programmer, whatever your language.
And it's easily understandable, you can almost read it like a novel, without focusing too much.
Though what may need some brains is applying the functional concepts of this book with your favourite language...
They do print the terms on paper. Usually, companies that don’t have a formal contract that both the employee and employer sign will still write down all the important information. First the employer sends an offer letter containing important information unique to the new employee, such as job title, compensation, work location, start date, etc. Then everything else is in some kind of employee handbook. The handbook details the expectations for every job title, the rules employees are expected to follow, rules for promotions and transfers, etc, etc. Together these have everything you would expect in a contract that both the employee and employer sign, and they are just as binding.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
“It would enhance productivity” is not a sufficient justification for requiring someone to do something. Ignoring safety regulations would often enhance productivity, but I’m sure you understand why we shouldn’t do that.
Ignoring safety regulations would not enhance productivity in the long term, so that example doesn't quite prove the point. Productivity enhancement in general is sufficient justification for a company, as otherwise they can simply fire you, hence, to them, it is sufficient.
I was assuming that other requirements associated with the software were otherwise met. If you're simply less productive all other things being equal, you should probably be at least eased out especially if you're simply refusing to use appropriate tools (assuming those tools actually do enhance productivity).
It’s called Ukraine. It would be particularly prudent to avoid using the Soviet-era nomenclature given the context of the conversation you’re participating in.
> "The Ukraine" is incorrect both grammatically and politically, says Oksana Kyzyma of the Embassy of Ukraine in London.
That doesn't really make any sense. There is no magical deity that arbitrates rules of English. It is merely a tool invented by humans to use as they please. The only semblance of "incorrectness" that might be found is in failing to communicate with the reader, but in this case you clearly had no trouble understanding what "the Ukraine" meant and I suspect nobody else has either.
> and politically
This makes more sense and is a much stronger point, but political correctness is bound to intent. There is no evidence I can see that suggests "the Ukraine" was previously used with intent to offend or marginalize the people of Ukraine. Even if "the Ukraine" can be used as a politically incorrect device, that does not imply that all usage is politically incorrect.
> It’s called Ukraine.
Officially that is true, but there is typically nothing official about a casual comment made on Hacker News. As before, context is significant, and there is nothing in the context that I can see that suggests that the comment was made in some kind of official capacity.
"The Ukraine" is grammatically incorrect for the same reason "the England" is grammatically incorrect. An article doesn't go there.
The politically incorrect usage here is not bound to intent, because unaware readers will subconsciously lower Ukraine's status in their minds regardless of whether the writer intended them to do so.
The official status, or lack thereof, of the comment doesn't matter either. There is no compelling reason to not use the accepted name. If your friend was called James, would you intentionally call him "the James" just because you're not making an official statement? That doesn't make any sense.
> "The Ukraine" is grammatically incorrect for the same reason "the England" is grammatically incorrect.
It is grammatically atypical, perhaps, but not incorrect. It is fundamentally impossible to use English 'incorrectly'. The closest you can get to any semblance of 'incorrectness' is failing to communicate with the reader. But that is certainly not the case here. Everyone is well aware that in the above comment 'the Ukraine' refers to Ukraine.
> The politically incorrect usage here is not bound to intent, because unaware readers will subconsciously lower Ukraine's status in their minds regardless of whether the writer intended them to do so.
A faulty lowering of Ukraine's status may be politically incorrect, but the words are not to blame. That's your fault for thinking about its status improperly. There is no onus on the writer to worry about a failing mind. If there were, communication would be out of the question.
> If your friend was called James, would you intentionally call him "the James" just because you're not making an official statement?
I personally would not be intentional when writing casually. That defeats the purpose of writing casually. If I happened to put "the" down on paper I certainly wouldn't put in the effort to remove it. Who cares? Assuming the context is otherwise clear, nobody is going to be confused about who "the James" is.
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