So, let’s say that it’s 2025, we forgot about COVID, and there’s an outbreak of a novel virus in a foreign country.
We’re in the same situation as January 5th, 2020.
Given our experience with COVID, what should we do? Which policies, etc?
“Because we survived COVID even though wounded by restrictions, next time we shouldn’t use restrictions.”
I’m afraid that because we learned the true lesson that semi-closing borders late didn’t work, we will have learned the wrong lesson that closing borders early won’t work.
Many suggested closing borders.
It’s correct, but there’s a major obstacle to take care of 👇
I created the rBook format in November 2020 with the publishing of the first rBook, "Ergodicity" (gum.co/ergodicity/ann…), and then followed it with a second rBook, "This is Management" gum.co/roambook/anniv…
Imagine you were an alien. On your planet, there aren’t schools. From your spaceship, you spend some time observing one of ours.
What would you guess schools are for?
(a thread on education)
I bet that education wouldn’t be the first of your hypotheses. After all, schools deliver much better on other metrics.
For example,
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Did you ever notice that most degrees are of the same length regardless of the complexity of the underlying field, and that some subjects are obsolete, as if their purpose was to employ teachers rather than teach useful skills?
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15h software debugging for 1.5T of metal on public roads is an extraordinary feat, only a genius or a psychopath could achieve that
I imagine the logic, “in 15h we couldn’t find any problem, this must mean our testing process is good enough and the software is ready for public beta”
“But there’s no alternative!”
There is: pay drivers specifically trained for testing autonomous vehicles. Like almost everyone else in the industry is doing.
This article has an interesting thesis: the false belief that prices have an allocative function but merely a redistributive one explains most of the economic BS heard over the past decades.
One implication of the false belief above is that taxes and minimal wages don't affect the price of labor and thus employment. Under such false belief, of course taxes and minimal wages are a no brainer! 🤦♂️
Controls are so lax, *and expected to be so lax*, that any punishment of such behavior will be a trolley problem of punishing some “genuinely unaware of managed trades” or inciting trading by controllers.
The less clarity and focus on Core Values, the more trolley problems later
Almost all “enforcement trolley problems” are downstream a lack of clarity in boundaries and/or low frequency of a violation to be caught
We want frequent controls to ensure the likelihood that large violations are malicious, thus more moral to prosecute.
Instead, allowing the risk of large violations by “genuinely honest but distracted” people (or who interpreted a grey area differently) makes it harder morally to prosecute violations: a vicious circle (less prosecution → less common knowledge of rules → more violations).
A very common example: a top manager asks all supervisors to communicate change X to their teams. Supervisors know they can’t do X or can’t communicate X as desired (because of some valid reason the top manager might not be aware of) but silently sit in the meeting until the end
Interestingly, the above will be seen as a trust violation by the managers (“you didn’t do what you promised”) but probably not by the supervisors (“you asked me something I couldn’t do [because of a lack of resources / problem Y / etc]”).