• latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    This just shows how utterly sickly job environments are nowadays, when lying and mindless self-promotion are considered “virtues…”

      • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        At my last job, I fulfilled my contractual obligations as well as I could. That’s all I did. I did it as best as I could without wringing myself dry, I didn’t pull the social butterfly act to ingratiate myself with my colleagues for social leverage, I just minded my own business and tried being polite and friendly when someone wanted to interact with me.

        I became an essential piece of the process without my wanting to do so, and then everyone started expecting me to work after hours and take on responsibilities which were not even related to my job (I was QA, had to pull PM duties more than I’d care to remember, and that was just a fragment of everything they expected I would do). Same pay, of course. I still don’t understand how the hell they didn’t see my resignation coming…

        Edit: and, no, I didn’t even want a management position, as I’d had one before and it was heartbreaking - I told them both of these things, outright and repeatedly. I just wanted to test apps…

    • Peanut@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      You mean the solution to this problem is not for everyone to become a solipsistic asshole?

      It’s to fix the system and culture that encourages it?

      But then i can’t feel justified abusing people around me to take everything i can from them and climb a rung on the socio-econinic ladder.

      What do you mean cancer kills the body? That’s the brains problem to figure out. Definitely not confused cells being coerced into an ignorant and totally destructive culture.

      Snide overload, but you really hit the nail on the head, and I think humans should cooperatively be able to do better than dumb cells. The excuses i see for being solipsistic in freaking and epistemically destructive are both disgusting and disappointing.

      • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        I agree with you 120%

        But how do you change the culture when the rewards for doing that kind of behavior significantly outweigh the cons? The Nash equilibrium ends up at being a con that blows smoke.

        • Peanut@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          TLDR: cooperation, solidarity, and understanding diverse perspectives, which is a large part of what ‘learning’ is, if you’ve ever learned about complex intelligent systems. which you should, because we want to resolve dissonance between different model perspectives without losing the ability to communicate, or becoming hostile. also dealing with the non-communicative parasitic patterns, like cults, which are like organisms that get ‘smarter’ and more ‘able’ at large scale, at least in regard to growing goodhart’s law style until the non-comprehended environment dies along with the host.

          Expanded:

          learning about learning is important. the scientific method, bayesian probabilistic weighting, how words work, history and diverse expert consensus, bias, etc.

          all very important and should be the main class in school at this point. if you don’t learn how to learn, you might just find a hole and build complexity within confabulations until nobody knows what you’re talking about, and you can no longer confirm your beliefs with the diverse representations of others.

          this will stack with how to build tools to resist social momentums, and tactics often used to stop progressive memes from gaining foothold. astroturfing/reframing/dividing.

          a story for framing

          a bunch of atheists want to stop your cult dogma from being pushed into schools? get a bunch of feminists mad at the ones protesting to end male genital mutilation, because ‘female genital mutilation is worse’ or some other terrible strawman that re-frames their actual position, and then get some 4channers or joe rogan chuds/rhetoric in there so you have more evidence of bad actors, would be funny if a bunch of media groups come into existence and then die, doing nothing but this kinda ragebait. nice. now both sides have legitimate grievances being dismissed by the other side while they attack each-other. now to push some more stuff for governments/schools to weaken people’s ability to comprehend the world or communicate.

          when they get mad at rich people, let them waste all their energy screaming at buildings, uh oh, anti-fascists and minority groups are rising up? better frame them like an apocalypse of a bunch of idiots on the news, rather than address the constant struggles and suffering people experience, because we want to be pandas and don’t want to adapt to new environments…

          and i like to constantly point out that mainstream journals will even note that the black american community was generally russian propaganda target #1. get your enemy to attack themselves, and you can pay some idiot to idiot his way into office through a bunch of social manipulation tactics, which are being actively described here.

          and nobody is educated enough to interpret the complexity when sometimes there’s a little uncomfortable truth everywhere. easier to pretend none of us see the uncomfortable mistakes of the flawed models currently being used to represent our reality.

          imagine being rich and doing whatever you want, and then spending a little of your hoard to ensure others can’t do what you don’t want them to do. that’s largely what’s going on. you can, through changing what people are able to interact with, hack a lot of minds if you got the money and power. this hackability comes from a lot of social energy minimization vie creating more simplified shared heuristic representations, so you can more easily predict each-other. (for a deep dive, see friston’s free energy principle/active inference, and epistemically focused followup by mahault albarracin.)

          that being said, it’s not just cristo-fascist think tanks like prager-u and the heritage foundation, but a diverse set of differently-able groups working together to support the sustenance of their non-progressive models. kinda a “we don’t fuck with each-other, as long as we target the tribe that wants to force us to think” deal between a bunch of idiotic patterns that continue existing like parasitic cultural organisms.

          so… we gotta fight it like one. like cells and organs of a body working together to fight a new parasite, using the intelligence and tools we have. understanding that the whole of humanity is our ‘body,’ and we’re fighting a cancer that uses noise/stress to disable cells and take them over.

          need to build structure’s that won’t just get noticed and hijacked before they can become effective. understanding how to de-escalate and reframe the thought process of someone who is currently stuck in cult style non-communication traps where they can’t update their model anymore. also need to follow it up so that the inevitability of growing diversity can lead to better forms of understanding the world and communicating, building a robust self-healing body, rather than trying to self-segregate and isolate until a parasite decides to rampage.

          hope that makes sense!

          • slacktoid@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            This does make sense. And I do agree with you. I hope this happens. I guess I’m just a little jaded with people in general.

          • architectonas@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Thanks for your effort! I like the cancer analogy. I wonder though, if our society might already be in metastasis. I try to keep my hope…

            learning about learning is important. the scientific method, bayesian probabilistic weighting, how words work, history and diverse expert consensus, bias, etc.

            Can you recommend literature?

            • Peanut@sopuli.xyz
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              1 day ago

              a lot of this is novel, and only now being properly understood from confidence of multiple expertise perspectives being compared, that allow more confidence in certain weightings on old ideas. some old ideas are hard to quickly correct for, because people don’t like digging out parts of their current model for making sense of the world.

              to be fair, that is mechanically connected to the same drives that run fear and everything else based on how we contextualize the ‘surprise’ we feel when the world doesn’t match our model.

              most of the stuff on surprisal is mostly in the karl friston direction, or predictive processing. active inference is a very good thing to study, because it teaches how we make sense of the world as a bunch of cells working together, in varied and often novel contexts.

              for more technical reading

              https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5299/Active-InferenceThe-Free-Energy-Principle-in-Mind

              free textbook on MIT, although it’s a couple years old now.

              https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38667857/

              this is one of my favourite current takes, basically anything around mahault, friston, or michael levin right now is great for a technical framing of things.

              levin is a good source if you like the cancer analogy

              https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33961843/

              although this writeup was a few years back. he is constantly interacting with different experts of different fields on youtube, and there’s a lot to be learned just hearing their conversations and sense making. some of the most amazing empirical results in recent experiments are coming out around michael levin’s work. he keeps a summary up to date for his broader message if anyone wants to know tufts university for something other than the government bagging students.

              more lighthearted and mainstream,

              algospeak by adam aleksic,

              Godel Escher Bach/i am a strange loop by douglas hofstadter,

              for understanding language and complexity.

              extra shortform,

              https://www.youtube.com/@theforestjar/videos

              the forest jar is often dismissed because of the art and dry delivery, but the topics are fantastic, comparing the represented perspectives of different ‘thought tools’ or representational perspectives, to convey a greater and more nuanced picture.

              a lot of knowledge is just understanding how cults work to sustain their current model of the world in-front of critique.

              some things are just general concepts that need to be better collected and talked about together, like the motte and bailey, and how cults, or people like jordon peterson will confabulate pockets of faux expertise complexity (kind of the same way AI will confabulate in a way that sounds like it makes sense) but he is actually just diverting and distracting so that he doesn’t need to deal with the dissonance in question. someone actually framed it well in his jubilee thing and it’s hard to call it out if the surrounding people aren’t familiar.

              that being said, any pocket can take all of your time if you let it, so we need to do better at creating cultures of cooperatively and intentionally interacting with this material. people with more social talent would be valuable here. etc.

              also artists should already be working with scientists to help with communicating the truth of current understanding, better than clickbait dishonest journal headlines.

              hopefully some good resources here, unless you’re looking for something else more specific.

      • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        You speak nothing but truth, it is beyond frustrating… And 100% agree, there is no “naturalistic” justification for this bullshit, nothing in this entire Universe is as messed up as the way we’ve structured our society. This is a pure, grade A, human invention.

      • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Fuck my life, I want off this fucking ride…

        Edit: I don’t even want my money back, I just want to quit while I’m behind…

    • Bad Jojo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneM
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      1 day ago

      …nowadays…

      Oooh boy. I hate to tell you this but as bad as it is now, it is also the best it has ever been.

      • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Honestly, I kinda’ disagree with this. My first job was nowhere near this messed up, nor did anyone have such expectations.

        Started off as QA in a large game producing company 13 years ago. This Agile bullshit was still half a decade away from being adopted as IT’s religion, we worked Waterfall. We had at least 2-3 days per build, a team of 20-30 people testing at once, and a couple of months per update. Procedures were clear, we had to pester management if anyone wanted overtime for whatever reason (and always had to justify it with concrete risks), nobody expected anyone else to kill themselves over the job. Hell, you didn’t even have to speak to anyone as long as you completed your tasks…

        To add, every single project on which we worked received top ratings, users praised the stability and reliability, the company never had to internally boost app ratings for anything.

        Edit: and this benefitted the Devs as well! They had so much time to work on figuring out bugs and to develop mind-bogglingly complex features which actually worked!

        Hell, I remember being called over by one of the Devs, so that I would repro a nasty math logic bug with them and we could both work on figuring out the cause. My guy was patiently looking for flip-flops on the internet when I got there, and told me to chill, go grab a coffee, smoke a cig, because “this’ll be our task for the rest of the day.” Sat down with him after 30 minutes of chillin’, bug was fixed and the fix deployed to Staging within an hour and a half after that… No pressure, no stress, no anger, just two people calmly working on fixing a problem together.

        • Bad Jojo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneM
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          1 day ago

          I hear what you are saying but that’s not an example of a systemic degradation of corporate culture, that’s an example of one company vs others. I have been working since the mid-90’s and there are a lot of rules, processes and procedures that are now widely adopted by default across the industry. These rules were not always there and from conversations I had in my early years it used to be much worse in the 70s and 80s. Don’t get me started on how bad it was for women, queer folk and minorities.

          • latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 day ago

            Well, I saw that systemic degradation with my very eyes, in every company I’ve worked… Quit my first job because they reduced team sizes, started demanding more speed, and basically told us “you’re on your own.”

            Same happened at my second job, a start-up. Then, at my third, these unhealthy dynamics were already present, then got even worse…

            I find it very hard to change my opinion that things have been getting worse and worse and worse over time. Capitalism may not have changed in itself, but people’s approach sure has… Faster for less money, always. And with every iteration, the goalposts keep being moved farther and farther from anything sane…

  • krox@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 day ago

    I have come to learn that in corporate America trivial things like physical restraints, functionality, laws of nature, and honestly reality as a whole can be completely ignored. They love this mentality too!

    What you actually accomplish and the feasibility of your goals are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is if you can blow enough smoke up the asses of those above you.

    Truth and humility simply aren’t compatible with american style business which is why silicon valley conmen are so successful, they can fool the ignorant wealthy

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 day ago

      Truth and humility simply aren’t compatible with american style business…

      This is 100% correct. Unfortunately it often works against non-American companies. One of our clients is a very large European company and they drive me crazy sometimes. For example, when we help them with bids on projects we analyze the feasibility of the project while taking into consideration the ability to deliver at the time of delivery. Basically we determine if we will be able to deliver. Our client determines if they can deliver…as in today. Because they don’t have the resources necessary to deliver today, they are reluctant to bid because the truth is that they cannot deliver. Our response is always that it’s only something to worry about after they have won the bid, but they resist. So their competitor, a ruthless American collection of hustlers comes in, bids even though they have NO resources, win the bid and proceed to hire what they need to deliver…and they do.

      To be clear, the European company was the better choice but potential clients want the warm and fussies. They want to feel that if they hire you, they will be taken care of. They DO NOT want to hear about your shortcomings or the challenges of the project. They are well aware. They want you to look them straight in the eyes and tell them “I’ve got this” so that weight can be off their shoilders.

  • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    You’ll quickly see the truth when you have abusive parents.

    In this world, its kill or be killed. Flowey was right.

    No mercy to nazis.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 day ago

      I have a friend (using the term loosely for an ex-colleague I am friendly with and have stayed in contact with for 20+ years) who has always said that his work is his entertainment. It is literally his fun.