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Bad Norms and Policies Produce "Legislatice Mediocrity" in Organizations
Summary:
Encouraging a culture of being teachable and open to listening to others is crucial for innovation and improvement in organizations.
While standard operating procedures (SOPs) and efficient systems are appreciated, they should not create taboos or hinder learning, leading to what the speaker refers to as 'legislative mediocrity.' The speaker advocates for a focus on innovation and continuous improvement, rather than being stifled by rigid norms and policies.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You want to be teachable and you want to have a culture of being teachable and listening to others. Yeah. That's that's really important. And so I love SOPs. I love I love it when you get a system working well and efficient. But I don't like it when it creates taboos and when it stops people learning. Legislative mediocrity. It drives me nuts. I'm very much let's do innovation. Let's improve.
Organizational Structures That Enable Knowledge Flow With Stuart French
Because You Need to Know Podcast ™
How Measurability/Mathematical Bias Limits the Scope of Scientific Inquiry and Human Discovery
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So there's this old paper from the, I think, 1960s by Eugene Vigner, the Nobel Prize physicist. It's called something like, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. The fun paper, and he's like, there's no good reason why mathematics should work as well as it does. And there's no good reason why there should be a tool that allows humans to predict things as well as math does. There's no good reason. It's kind of nuts. And we should all just be grateful. And he says some other things, but he's basically just kind of being all about how great mathematics is and how there's no good reason why it should be. And it's pretty cool that it does work so well. I think that there's a counter to that, which is that not everything is that easily described that mathematics. And there's lots of things for which mathematics is not that effective at describing. And it's actually just the things that were well described or easily described by mathematics are the things that were discovered using mathematical tools. They're the things that lend themselves that were amenable to mathematical inquiry. And a lot of the things that we're interested in terms of social science and cognitive science and the related philosophical inquiry are things that are much less tangible in terms Of this kind of specification. And you can see it like in a physics equation, right, a physical theory, whether it's about mass or electricity or something else, right, you have a theory about how things work. And then you can write out equations. And all the terms in the equations have units. And they are all directly related to the things that are measurable. The theories are directly about relationships between things that are measured. And in social theories and cognitive theories, so often our theories are about relating constructs. And then we have proxy measurements, but the theory isn't about the relationship between the proxy measures. The theory is about the constructs and the relationships between the constructs that are social in nature, that are cognitive in nature, but aren't the things that are being measured. And so there's this gap. And I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Have we overshot the scale at which humans can effectively coordinate?
Summary:
We need Jim Rutt to join the conversation to discuss whether we have exceeded our ability to coordinate effectively.
The slow progress of science and the population growth curve are related to this question. Sam Bowles and his work on behavioral engineering and the return of civil society are also important in this discussion.
We are currently witnessing a clash between institutions and individuals, and something has to give.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
We need Jim Rutt on this conversation right because ultimately this is about have we actually overshot the scale at which we can effectively coordinate and all these studies like you Know this I know it's controversial but like the slowed canonical progress of science these kinds of questions they seem related in a way to the sigmoidal curve of population growth. Have we risen above a level at which intelligibility can actually happen and if so where was that level. I mean I remember you know Sam Bowles is another person who has been looming large for me over this whole conversation not only for his work on the problems of viewing humans as agents That can be governed through behavioral engineering via incentive but also because of the paper that he wrote with Wendy Carlin the article he wrote in Vox EU in 2020 on the battle for The COVID-19 narrative which talked about the return of the civil society you know meaning that the Mesoscopic world of guilds and church groups and sports clubs and pubs and neighborhood Organizations mutual aid networks and all of these other human scale sub-done bar number structures that we found ourselves suddenly very much in need of and yet were eroded by the Radical success of both state power and market power in every way it feels like we are in a kind of clash of the titans right now we're like you know we watch institutions going up against Large institutions and people are struggling to remain unpolverized underfoot. At some point something has to give right.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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