This is going to be choppy. Just a few lines at a time. Doing it here to organize my thoughts, so forgive the stream of consciousness thing.
1. Failure is easy. It is just the absence of success. True disaster is an art form.
2. You don't learn from success.
3. Compare the dems and GOP to the green & blue factions from the Hippodrome. Same exact phenomena, seems to be as unstoppable as the tides.
4. Failure is always an option inevitable, given enough time. Enough iterations of anything lead to the collapse of any system. This is particularly true in systems that feed back into themselves (IE, the Hippodrome hooligans, American politics, etc).
5. Heard this the other day: "Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people." Tradition is the boundary of safe success, but itself becomes a millstone around your neck as conditions change.
More later.
The typical root cause of failure is "people unwilling to abandon an idea in the face of facts."
People on opposing sides will use the exact same arguments with respect to information that threatens their beliefs. An example is the recent announcement that Russia has been engaging in fuckery with respect to helping the 2020 campaigns of Trump AND Sanders. Sanders fans, instead of thinking for two seconds and then saying "Sanders isn't cooperating with them like Trump did", they fly right off the handle saying that there is no Russian interference and anyone who says there is is nuts. Just like the MAGA freaks.
A certain type of Sanders fan will not make it through the preceding paragraph and will instead go completely bonkers.
Nothing to disagree with so far.
I dig.
I especially like rule 2.
I have on occasion by being polite and subtly Socratic shown people the paradox and shallowness of their prejudice only to literally see them abandon reasoning entirely for dogmatic statements supporting the prejudice and then LOOK AT ME like something was wrong with me. It's unsettling to see it in one lone cabbage. It's fucking horrific to see a whole cabbage patch do the same and whisper to each other about you.
I suspect that they whisper because they know it won't stand to reason whatever it is. They just want to talk shit, mob up, and laugh about how righteous they are while you twist and burn. Cabbages are fucking dangerous.
Quote from: Doktor Howl on February 23, 2020, 05:35:24 AM
2. You don't learn from success.
There is a kind of pyrrhic success, where you
think you've learned something, but this knowledge just leads to a more profound failure.
For example, when the department succeeds at an extremely difficult project, and management draws the conclusion that far more difficult projects are possible, when in fact,
that shit don't scale.
And the following projects are nightmare upon nightmare, and one of your co-workers begins to repeat, "all our present problems started when project C succeeded."
Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on February 28, 2020, 02:16:07 AM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on February 23, 2020, 05:35:24 AM
2. You don't learn from success.
There is a kind of pyrrhic success, where you think you've learned something, but this knowledge just leads to a more profound failure.
For example, when the department succeeds at an extremely difficult project, and management draws the conclusion that far more difficult projects are possible, when in fact, that shit don't scale.
And the following projects are nightmare upon nightmare, and one of your co-workers begins to repeat, "all our present problems started when project C succeeded."
Everything scales, if you're stupid and wear a crash helmet.