The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;

1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?

2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?

3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?

4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?

5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?

6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?

This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.

What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?

At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;

• INDIVIDUAL

• DIGNITY

• ENTITLEMENT

It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.

Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.

The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.

0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.

Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.

Management can 'drill down' to get information on how specific teams responded.

One of the things they mentioned doing is using a statistical (differential privacy?) model to limit the depth, to prevent any specific persons responses being revealed unless it was shared with a substantial number of other responses.

Surprisingly difficult when you consider e.g. a team lead reading a statement like "of the 10 people in your team, one is highly dissatisfied with management" - they have personal knowledge of the situation and are going to know which person it is.

They later decided to adopt it for an annual IT satisfaction survey that they sent out to users. In an ideal world we wouldn't participate because the respondents were grading my team's performance but we got invites because we were part of the Exchange distro the message was sent to. I quickly discovered that the dev team had left a bunch of default routes enabled so we were able to view a list of all responses and see who submitted which. We knew our customers well enough that we could reliably attribute most of the negative responses via the free-text comments field anyhow but the fact that anybody could explicitly see everybody else's response wasn't great.

I suppose the NTLM-authenticated username in the server logs would convey the same info but at least that'd require CIFS/RDP access to the web server...

The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.

You need to stop ignoring your side's bad behaviour.

Or, better yet, don't pick a side.

Well, that was already the first sign of senility. Trump, at that point, was already a know quantity for decades: a crook and a con man.

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>

> The other, I can never seem to find.

Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>

But that's mild compared to what he says. He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.

You should read the chapters. https://www.scribd.com/doc/156175634/the-dilbert-future-pdf. Starts on 218.

A lot of time has past since I read Scott Adams view on manifesting. I got a decent way through before I realised it wasn't satire. It did seem clear to me that he was advocating a form of manifesting that went beyond either of those principles. That benefits came from manifesting in ways that no-other influence from yourself would be possible. That's essentially declaring it to be magic. Psychology I can believe, if you want me to believe in magic you're going to need a bit more.

From the point of view of an ADHD person, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who had the ability to do a dumb task like manifesting would also have the ability to do meaningful things that that I find nearly impossible.

Visualization is a thing, something happens when you can see it happening.

Yeah, that actually is an inability to process reality. Stuff changes, and things have never been stable or orderly.

And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".

In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.

You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.

(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)

... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.

Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.

Adams's version of manifesting is "if you write stuff down, it's more likely that outcomes outside of your control will help you achieve your goal."

Those are not the same thing.

The sheer volume of "woo" and positive affirmation manifestation among my friends is vastly higher on the left side of the spectrum than the right.

Perhaps it's more to do with extreme personalities and wishful thinking.

The phrase is referring to the tool. It is not a reference to the derogatory slang term at all. It dates back to Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica, and the earliest version of it that appeared in English was in 1542.

All of that was centuries before "spade" also became used as derogatory slang. The phrase is no more racist than "like white on rice".

I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.

The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?

I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine.

But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art.

But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.

It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?

H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.

So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.

In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.

Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.

I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...

Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.

People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).

His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle.

I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.

To get a bit off-topic...

R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels.

Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.

Except the focus on black americans, being most of his life in europe he mostly hates the gypsys and serbians.

But no worries, he's older than Biden and he'll be gone soon and we can make the world what we want it to be.

And boy were they right about that. Nobody on earth is easier to bait than journalists.

It would help if the mainstream culture admitted that racism against white people exists too, and that it is unacceptable, as every other form of racism is.

Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment.

Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.

Yeah. Hanoi Jane and Beatles Burnings quickly come to mind.

(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)

surprised that it didn't escape prostate with that high load.

What I don't understand is spending your days shitposting on Twitter about it. I'm not sure if that applies to Adams, but it definitely applies to Musk and Rowling.

It's such a bizarre hill to die on.

That sounds like a lot of unnecessary double tax being paid.

The problem, is that mountains of these kind of people say they are fine with trans people, but voted for this administration, and when you ask, they say "Kamala was going to gender change our kids" or some such bullshit.

So the culture war was fine to them, they just hadn't heard a hateful argument that touched their button yet.

My dad talked for like an entire year about how he's been newly dealing with non-binary and trans folk at the grocery store he was (at the time) managing, and how he thinks they are great and such nice people and their gender or whatever is not a work problem and he thinks "that people just need to have more patience with each other" but he voted for Trump

Because the liberals "have gone too far" with the "DEI stuff" and commented that he was worried that helicopter pilot from that accident was "rushed into someone else's spot"

Because she's a woman. And obviously we don't have like a hundred year history of talented and capable women pilots or anything. And it's not like women have been pilots in American commercial Aviation for decades with a clear trend of increasing safety. And obviously he has always had this consistent worry about woman pilots and feeling like he can't trust their ability and this totally isn't something that Fox News manufactured out of thin air these past couple years.

Which is funny because there is an actual, genuine, air traffic control scandal where a Black institution had perverted some pre-screening to give members of that Black institution an unfair advantage in screening. But even that horrible situation never put an unqualified or undertrained person on the job. It just made more of the members of the incoming training class black.

But that's the actual problem they don't like. DEI doesn't involve passing someone who should have failed, even in the blatant scandal I mentioned above

Why?

> and i don't wish cancer on anyone.

vs

> Get yourself a better doctor [in the context of: "Here's a nickel, Kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."]

Do own your statements, Kid.