News:

PD.com: "a rather irritating form of hermetic terrorism".

Main Menu

The Dataist Manifesto, part II

Started by The Good Reverend Roger, July 26, 2017, 01:56:13 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

The Good Reverend Roger

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- some wiseguy


The thing about problem solving is that it's hard fucking work.  It isn't over when you peel away all the bullshit and find the answer...Because then you have to prove it, and if you're particularly unlucky, you have to impliment it.  Act on it.

And this is really the point at which you can sort your basic ivory tower bullshit from genuinely useful information.  An unworkable answer is no answer at all, and all you've done is waste everyone's irreplaceable time on this planet.  This handy tip lets you discard communism, libertarianism, anarchism, supply side economics, and every damn clickbait "science" page ever inflicted on the internet.  If you want to sit around coming up with "solutions" that can't work, great.  Just do it in private and maybe wash your hands afterward.

Now, this doesn't mean you can't bring experts in.  Hell, you probably should, if it's anything technical.  But if you're just an "idea man", then no amount of experts can help you.  Nor can they help you if you hire them and then don't listen to them.  You might be the best engineer in the damn world, but don't try to explain porosity to a welder, if you know what I mean.  And I think you do.

Which brings me to my next point.

You might be smart, but you're not the only one that is smart.

You MIGHT be an iconoclastic thinker.  Everyone else MIGHT be doing things wrong just because "that's how we've done it for 20 years" (and this DOES happen), but you can spare yourself a ton of misery, wasted effort, and the mockery of your peers if you just SHUT YOUR DAMN PIE HOLE and LISTEN when someone brings up an objection to your beautiful idea.  Especially if they've been doing it for 20 years.  Experience is a painful teacher, and why not learn something the EASY way, by which I mean "listening to what the other person has to say" rather than by signing up for what might be an unreasonable amount of said painful learning?

The future isn't just brought on by revolutionary speakers.  No.  Mostly, in fact, it is brought on by lifetimess of accumulated knowledge, of one generation after another learning from the mistakes of the people who came before them.  So when the blue collar dude who has been running that machine since before you were born tells you your idea is flawed, at least hear the guy out.  He might just save your reputation; in some cases, he might just save your life.

Which in fact leads to...

You are useless by yourself.

Humans are a cooperative species.  If you can't cooperate to achieve results, you have failed at "human".  If you discourage or punish cooperation, just throw yourself off the nearest bridge, because you are in fact directly harming the species by your very presence.  The world will not miss your "alpha" ass, and neither will the people around you.  You are not a leader or lone wolf, you are an impediment to everyone around you.

This also implies that you might have to share the credit for your beautiful idea's translation into real-world application.  How awful.  How terribly unfair.  Scream to me your anger at the very notion...But don't expect any sympathy from me, because almost all the great things in the world you live in came from humans being the insanely inventive, *cooperative* species that it is.

To be continued.




" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

The Wizard Joseph

I'm loving this series Roger! I've always preferred practical application to abstract thought and collaboration to the ego games in the workplace. Finding both can be.. rare, but they are beautiful when you find them together.

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

LMNO

Hell yeah.

I'm working on developing this massive software work management project, and the amount of senior-level people blindly directing the production side to do whatever their latest "business guru" book tells them to do, regardless of the context, is predictable, and yet also disheartening.

Ziegejunge

 :mittens:

If I could send messages back in time to my past self, this would be one of them.

Vanadium Gryllz

"I was fine until my skin came off.  I'm never going to South Attelboro again."

Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard

Quote from: Ziegejunge on July 26, 2017, 06:20:26 PM
:mittens:

If I could send messages back in time to my past self, this would be one of them.

Someone once asked me if I came back from the future to right now and I could tell myself one thing, what would it be? I said, "Go back earlier."
"I never thought of shaving my beard and freeing the slaves, but I thought of shaving the slaves and freeing my beard!"
~ Abrahaham Lincololn