This seems kind of like a twist on the classic 5 Whys method of root cause analysis. I think 5 Whys would work just as well in most of the example scenarios.
Example from the post: Engineer is thinking about doing a thing without permission. Why? Engineer thinks nobody accepts his ideas. Why? 5 possible answers. We could ask "Why?" again and get another step down (the author doesn't do this and instead proposes jumping into tests right away, which I think is still at least a level too high). One answer given: Engineer thinks his ideas are good, but they are bad. Why? Engineer probably isn't validating their ideas against feasibility, business outcome, maintainability, etc. Why? Engineer might be arrogant or inexperienced with real business settings vs. university/hobby projects. Now we have a root cause we can address and then move back up the chain.
When you can't ask "Why?" anymore without it being silly, that's when it's time to run tests and propose solutions.
5-whys is a linked list. Sometimes, things don't have a single cause. One mental model I find useful, while harder to apply, is to see things as a web of dependency. What are the whys for this layer of problem. What other problems are also implicated by the "why". i.e. A graph
Yeah, I was just about to reply about fishbone diagrams too. Those are an improvement on the right direction.
But notice that they don't fit the GP's explanation at all. As strange as that may sound, causality is not unidirectional in a complex system. You are losing data by coercing it into that, and that data is quite often relevant to how you fix a problem, even if it's not commonly relevant for identifying the problem.
Although that’s true, often something like a fishbone diagram will help to create a prioritised to-do list to fix whatever is broken (or at least understand what caused it to break if it’s not fixable).
Thank you for clarifying. Re-reading the message, the intention wasn't obvious at all.
For example, given a wet floor, 5-why tends to give a single reason, e.g. because it rained, and people may drill deeper into why it rained. My intention was to search broadly, i.e. what could also cause wet floor, the weather, a burst pipe, a road cleaning truck, a nearby fire, etc, and also to search adjacently, e.g. water outage due to burst pipe, flooding due to rain, etc. This will quickly expand the searching surface.
It helped me to see the river instead of flowing downstream. e.g. Engineers was drowning in "tasks", it is not uncommon to have solutions along the line of work harder, pay down tech debt and hire more within the engineering org. But upon searching, the cause might be anywhere between lacking product market fit, broken and interdependent processes, fragmented and over specialised teams and tooling, and religious pursuit of growth, which has nothing to do with engineering in a traditional sense.
What people often forget is that the goal of 5 Why's is to arrive at an actionable 5th Why. There's some chess that starts around the third Why, and good players end up at a useful 5th, bad players end up at 'git gud scrub'.
> When you can't ask "Why?" anymore without it being silly, that's when it's time to run tests and propose solutions.
In the past year, I started a new role as a head of engineering for an existing team. I literally spent the first month asking "why" about nearly everything. The most common answers ended up being "I don't know, it's what we do", which was closely followed by some justification that boiled down to being a workaround for some anti-patterns. E.g. Q: "Why do we log this error at DEBUG level?" A: "It happens so often that it fills the logs when we log it at a higher level". Me: :(
This is why its a good idea to tell new hires to not be shy about asking "Why?". They haven't had enough time to become numb to the idiosyncrasies of the organization. At some point, you start to live with all those little problems, forget they are actual problems, and you just live with them until someone asks "Why?" and you respond "yeah, why DO we do that?"
I'm literally dealing with that as we speak. Some architecture developed by the Staff Eng. on a team that's really not workable and was causing the team to run in circles. Ultimately, I had to jump in and ask a lot of questions about the implementation. i.e. Why was it built that way, along with the related questions about what goals of the implementation were (elegance, speed to delivery, future-proofing, ability to parallelize code effort, etc) and what app/business problems the code was solving.
One of my newer talking points is that logs are for new problems, existing ones get stats.
In theory logging should be more efficient than stats, but in practice, we use logging frameworks that are fractionally as complex as our stats frameworks, and at any rate nobody reads logs and probably haven't for at least ten years. Once your cluster size is more than about 3 servers you need aggregated logs. What we read is the output of log aggregators, and log parsing libraries are doing a lot of work. Way more than the ingestion side of a telemetry service, which is parsing a very simple message schema.
I'm always a little surprised how much engineers undervalue graphs until they see one that catches problems. I'm not entirely sure where that comes from, but I've known a few who have trauma from bad graphs causing drama. There's a lot of human factors around charting and most developers are largely blind to human factors concerns, even as they catch themselves making category errors with bad charts.
5 Whys, or as I like to call it, "Jumping to Conclusions."
Viewing the world as a direct line of causal relationships is called, "making a story." You can take it all the way back to the beating of butterfly wings if you'd like. It's also quite ineffective at addressing systemic issues and connected relationships.
An alternative approach to post-hoc rationalization is to look into the factors that contributed to a particular outcome (or recurring set of related outcomes) and determine relationships between them: there are often systematic reasons for particular outcomes and not a singular event. Systems are not set up like dominoes in neat rows. It's usually much more messy than that.
You can follow such a causal chain a few steps and say, "look I found the root cause!" But you won't solve the problem if you don't identify the systemic factors that lead to such situations. Even if you apply a solution to that root cause, you may find the outcome happens again -- it just finds another way around your patch, sort of like a cartoon of character trying to fix a leak in their plumbing by covering it up. To really solve the problem they need to turn the water off at the entry point, reconsider the plumbing set up, and fix their budgeting so that they allocate funds to preventative maintenance. Instead we get to laugh as they get squirted in the face over and over as they try more elaborate schemes to plug all of the holes.
An example of a common factor in software development: leadership that prefers features shipped on a deadline. They will do anything to ship by the deadline. There may be a right way to do things to prevent errors in the system but not acknowledging this when an issue comes up, by jumping to conclusions about root causes, means your team will be constantly fighting fires in your production environment instead of taking the time to write specifications and modelling them and properly testing things. You may feel good about finding that one line of code that caused the outage. You may apply the patch and be the hero of the week. But it's not a matter of if another outage will happen but when because you haven't addressed the confounding factor that causes situations like that to happen again and again. If it doesn't get addressed then the leadership will find other post-hoc rationalizations for why these situations keep happening where the development team is, "getting slow."
To take it back to the article: if people are ignoring your advice constantly, are you going to find out why by stepping back through a causal chain to a root cause? What if you did find a satisfying cause and you address that issue. Does that mean people will listen to you or will you only get that one idea through before you notice the pattern repeating?
I like the idea the article suggests of trying several things. It could be an issue like discrimination: notice that all of your colleagues are young, white, and male presenting? Does anyone else on your team that doesn't fall into that demographic get their ideas through? Maybe that's only part of it though. It could also be true that your ideas need work as well. Trying a few things may make all the difference.
Ask why, but also look at the surrounding environment and see if you notice any recurring patterns or relationships around the incident. After all, you don't find the source of disease by following the individual; you need to find the patterns that lead you to the wells.
Might depend on the team or moderator, but in my experience 5 Whys can help uncover the exact systemic issues you are talking about. The key is that it’s not about how to make sure this specific problem cannot reoccur, but more broadly, how to make sure a problem of that kind can never happen again. Your last paragraph puts it really well. 5 Whys helps with that by making you go deeper.
> An alternative approach to post-hoc rationalization is to look into the factors that contributed to a particular outcome
That's... 5 Why's. If that's not happening for your 5 Why's, you can try to start steering things more assertively. The worst 5 Why's I've ever encountered looked a bit like children wearing mommy's dress shoes. I've had pretty good luck railroading such milquetoast RCAs into something at least moderately productive. There's always one person with an agenda but in my experience most people seem relieved that anyone else wants the reins. You don't even have to be in charge, you just have to keep drawing attention back to the person with the most coherent comments.
You have a problem, what does it look like? Do we have other problems that look like this? Is there a concrete action we can take to reduce the impact of this problem moving forward (ie, what aspect of the 4th why can we actually fix)? Are there other actions that would be more effective? Or more timely? Can we split the difference and half-fix a problem instead and circle back the next time it happens?
That's all 5 Why's. Or at least, the ones I attend.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use 5-Why's in one's analysis. I am suggesting that it should not be the only tool one uses. If success requires several contributing factors that are necessary and jointly sufficient to enable it, then failure should not be limited to a single root cause.
> The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO, the English National Health Service, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Joint Commission and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective. Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy.
> In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS). It also plays a key role in Lean (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology:
The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123)
> This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely).
> ...
> It is clear from the tree diagram that the causal pathway related to the wristband printer is neither the only relevant cause of the incident nor indisputably the most important. A serious effort to solve the myriad problems that gave rise to this incident would have to tackle a number of other causal pathways as well.
> ...
> There are many ‘correct’ ways a team might use ‘5 whys’ to assess even this one incident. And it is unlikely that any two teams would independently arrive at exactly the same results. This subjectivity is critically important because ‘5 whys’ focuses on only one root cause at the end of one causal pathway.
> ...
> Targeting only the most distal cause
> Not only are users of ‘5 whys’ limited to one root cause per causal pathway, but they are also limited to selecting only the most distal cause (conventionally, the fifth ‘why’). There is, however, no logical reason to assume that this is always the most effective or most efficient target for intervention.
> Actually, if it were possible to magically place a 100% effective risk control at any one point on the tree diagram, it would be best used on a proximate cause. For instance, making it impossible to administer medication without checking the wristband would render all the more distal causes moot for the purpose of preventing a recurrence.
> And, while 100% effective risk controls are seldom available, an action plan that includes a proven26 (if certainly imperfect) intervention like a well-designed bar-code reader with a forcing function for patient identification (ID) is more likely to prevent another serious ‘wrong patient’ medication error than switching to a well-designed printer.
> This is not to suggest that more distal causes are not appropriate targets for improvement efforts. In the example presented in figure 1, for instance, there is clearly a profound need to change the culture from one that is task...
I think article would be more interesting if the author had actually solved the advertisement professionals problem, and not just made it into five or six possible problems and left it at that.
Unfortunately for the author, it would then become apparent that this approach is just something that sounds great for a blog post and has little to no practical value.
The advice isn't even consistent. He says that you need to break things down into a "one-word" problem, because anything bigger than that is too hard and abstract. And yet, his little template to fill out "I don't have a ___ problem, I have a ___ problem" gets filled out with single words in each instance!
"I don't have an acceptance problem. I have a communication problem".
The latter is somehow preferred to the former. Why?
Is there a name for this kind of post? I've been calling it "abstract workplace philosophy"[0] in my head. I always feel like this sort of thing is too general to be applicable to me. My workplace problems are usually more of the "we got this bug report and looking at the code you're not sure if the feature ever worked to begin with" flavor.
[0] Or banal workplace philosophy if I'm feeling uncharitable.
A lot of these seem to fall into the "Management Philosophy" category - applicable if you're a manager or if you are attempting to manage your own career as opposed to solving day-to-day task issues.
I think some transparency is good. I prefer to know what keeps my manager up at night, ie: what are the big problems they are solving. That way I can help or offer context etc.
Likewise, I'll share some of the problems I'm working on with my reports. You don't hand these problems down though, you just talk about it and solicit feedback & ideas.
Too often symptoms get confused with problems. Symptoms are also not The Problem. But act, they do. In the end, it's more or less a riff on the Monkey & Pedestal syndrome (?).
> In DraftKing’s case, Robins realized he had a relationships problem. DraftKings had no relationships with lawmakers, which meant no open dialog or opportunity to create common ground. So they invested in lobbyists, started meeting with local officials, and ultimately helped craft laws that made lawmakers happy but kept DraftKings in business.
Ah yes. "Here's a tip to make the world worse."
Not that they're wrong, but that's such a disappointing example.
Pretending horrible bastards aren't 'lobbying' isn't going to fix the problem.
The one-word problem here could be 'lobbyists' or 'lawmakers' or 'bribery' or 'exploitation'. It could even be just as the article said: 'relationships'... But it sure isn't this article, written after the fact, with no hint of actually condoning said behavior other than failing to pass moral judgment.
If you think about it some more, you might be glad that the author reminded us about this. Our lawmakers sell us out to fossil fuels, big banks, corporate media, telecomms, polluters, etc, and then tell us it's raining.
All the while, normal well adjusted people, don’t want to get “political” but wealthy special interests are happy to “open dialogs” and “find common ground” with elected officials we elect once every two years.
Democracy is hard. If participation is limited to voting in an election, the public interest will be ignored.
> Being able to participate more with money disproportionately benefits the rich.
Fully true. The public is relegated to - at best - a veto vote on corruption, which they rarely use (and are rarely informed as to why they should. Thanks press!).
Kind of like those "small boy sells limonade so his bed-ridden father can buy artificially expensive treatment" articles that are meant to showcase community, but actually show the heartlessness of insurance and medical for-profit companies?
Everyone likes to rant about lobbyists and lobbying, which are strange names for something Thomas Jefferson chose instead to call "petitioning government for redress of grievances".
Is it that you just dislike it when other people exercise their rights? Is it that you don't bother to exercise those same rights yourself, and so they shouldn't be allowed to do so either? Or maybe it's just that they're better at it and that seems unfair to you?
Is gambling a grievance? There are lots of things the government rightly doesn’t let us do, or, strongly discourages us from doing, because they are bad for us. Of course, this is the same government that supports gambling in the form of the lottery, so clearly they don’t have people’s best interests in mind.
My uncle, who is disabled, made $10000 in Vegas last month. My second cousin won the lottery 7 years ago and bought emission-free vehicles for her entire family. Was gambling bad for them?
As you are no doubt aware, if you're evaluating if a thing is good or bad you have to consider its net effect, not a couple isolated examples. This is just a "smoking feels good and well I didn't get lung cancer" argument.
My uncle plays at the Mirage, so excess profits benefit a forgotten community (the Seminole tribe) that was historically and brutally marginalized by the privileged ‘society’ whose net effect you are considering.
The uncle that won $10,000? So that little tidbit wasn't good after all, he was stealing money from a historically marginalized community. And the lotto winner was similarly taking money from public schools.
Someone in Las Vegas last month lost $10,000. For the last 7 years someone has religiously purchased lottery tickets, never winning. Was gambling good for them?
I notice another comment already explained, so I'll just borrow it:
> It taught them gambling pays, and makes them more likely to lose money in the future.
By definition gambling is losing money in long terms (otherwise it's investing, not gambling). A disabled is less likely to recover after a financial disaster.
Obviously because reinforcing what is most likely a psychological addiction is not a good thing, especially amongst a population who in other legal contexts cannot typically give informed consent?
Frankly you come off as purposefully obtuse for the sake of arguing.
My uncle is a triple amputee war vet with a Stanford degree and I’m not sure how he would take to your removal of his agency via accusations of inability to consent or safely gamble
There are two kinds of disabilities, mental and physical. I live alongside people with the former every day, and have my whole life. So while I admit I made an assumption, you failed to be specific.
For the next time you cherry pick anecdotes to try and support some outlandish position, I suggest you at least be specific while doing so. Unless of course that lack of specificity was intentional and this was meant to be a “gotcha”.
Exceptions don't make it good for the majority of society. Those exceptions are also what keeps people hooked, chasing a carrot until their bank account is empty.
There is a fundamental disconnect between people such as yourself, and the grievances about our broken system that we have today.
I agree, in a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with the concept of lobbying. I would go out on a limb (well not quite a limb, I have family members that were lobbyists) and say the majority of lobbying that occurs in the US is actually good.
But where it's bad, it's really bad. The loudest and most influential voices are the ones with the most money, and sometimes that's good, but a lot of times thats bad. They promise golden parachutes and shower politicians with money so much so that even if the politician gets burned, they are promised a career at the lobbying firm or with one of the "hookups". Again this is bad, because now instead of being accountable to the constituency, our politicians are accountable to their benefactors.
There's a lot more reasons this is wrong, but this is the primary gist. I hope we can all agree this is an issue.
What do rights have to do with it? We'd prefer the world one way and one rich company would prefer it another way. Who wins? The rich company, turns out.
These people -- the blogger, his friend, etc -- could easily 'exercise' their rights, as you say, in a good way, or a bad one. They choose a bad one, for greed. There's nothing better to dislike than "somebody did a bad thing on purpose."
I think the reference to Jefferson, as if modern lobbying is a foundation of US Democracy, is extraordinarily distasteful.
Here are some entire books written by people who studied this issue in great depth:
"The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate" by Lee Drutman: In this book, Drutman explains how and why corporations became so invested in influencing politics, and what that means for the future of American democracy.
"Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It" by Lawrence Lessig: This book by a prominent legal scholar and activist provides a comprehensive analysis of the influence of money on politics and proposes innovative solutions for reform.
"So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government" by Robert G. Kaiser: A detailed look at the rise of the lobbying industry in Washington and its impact on American democracy.
This shit is killing people, no exaggeration. The rise in inequality over the last 50 years is rotting America's heart and soul out. US style lobbying is right at the center of it.
In this case the “grievance“ being inability to operate a fundamentally exploitative and degenerate enterprise. Upon being redressed on such matters the proper response from a politician would be, gfy. Not, “well, just how much money do you plan to give me?“
No, not the inability. Gambling prohibition never prevented gambling to any great degree (worse still, it definitely never prevented it for the people who have the most crippling gambling addictions).
Gambling prohibition only prevents gambling regulation. You don't get to regulate illegal things.
God save us from busybodies trying to protect us from ourselves.
> Gambling prohibition never prevented gambling to any great degree
You think there is no more gambling occurring in a world where you walk into a convenience store and there is a slot machine or whatever, or you watch a sporting event and 50% of the advertisements are for gambling, as opposed to a world where those things are not the case?
> You don't get to regulate illegal things.
Illegal things are regulated, these things are not allowed, do them and you will punished. The regulation is very clear.
> God save us from busybodies trying to protect us from ourselves.
I was once having a conversation with someone on this topic of gambling, and the problems it incurs to members of society, and by extension society as a whole. She had personal experience with a former spouse having a gambling problem.
She said something to the effect of “Well yeah, it’s not good, but you can’t legislate morality.“
I kind of nodded in agreement like, yeah, fair point.
But upon later reflection it occurred to me that what are laws if not the legislation of morality? That’s literally what laws are.
Should we not bother being busybodies having laws preventing theft and murder?
After all people still commit these acts should we not bother with regulations against them, attempting to protect people from themselves, and society from the negative downstream effects?
Ah but you say, it’s a victimless act. Let people have their big gulps, let people gamble.
It is a victimless act until it isn’t, like speeding or drunk driving.
If a father downloads an app and blows through his families monthly resources with a few button presses that creates problems not just for him but the rest of his family and other people are going to have to pick up the slack.
These ventures being allowed into the system of capital creates incentives for as much of these problems in society as possible from the perspective of the proprietors of these ventures in order for them to extract the most capital profits that they can.
(“Capital profits” meaning profit in the most narrowly defined sense in terms of numbers in a database. Is someone involved in this stuff profiting in anyway spiritually or emotionally in the way that comes from providing something of value to society?)
That is why it is de-generate. Nothing good is being created / generated.
> Illegal things are regulated, these things are not allowed,
No. They're not regulated. Everyone knows where to get them anyway, or knows someone who knows where to get them. And they do.
But those things are more dangerous for everyone. You don't get to make them safe by demanding inspections. You don't get to make sure no one's cheating. It acts as a huge drain on revenue, instead of the taxable economic activity it should be.
Your "regulation" is some delusional DEA Czar talking about protecting kids from drugs and winning a war against an abstract concept. Meanwhile those kids buy dirty street shit mixed with rat poison and elephant tranquilizer.
I'm not a big fan of regulation, mind you, but I think I speak even for the pro-regulation folks when I say "that's not the kind of regulation anyone wants or that anyone means when they use the word".
> But upon later reflection it occurred to me that what are laws if not the legislation of morality? That’s literally what laws are.
That's not what laws are for. It seems like it to naive people. But then they try to prohibit things people are going to do anyway, even when those things won't harm others if done.
And, if any of this just rubs you the wrong way, you can go read up on the extensive real world experimentation where we discover just how awful those attempts go.
Laws are for "making things better". It may be that people who rape toddlers deserve to be executed, but if you make that a law you don't make the world better... you just end up with more dead toddlers. Laws drafted badly create perverse incentives.
> Ah but you say, it’s a victimless act. Let people have their big gulps, let people gamble. It is a victimless act until it isn’t, like speeding or drunk driving.
No one said you can't prohibit drunk driving. Though, even for that, there are limits to how intense this prohibition can be. The thing you can't do without it being lunacy, is outlawing the drinking itself.
> If a father downloads an app and blows through his families monthly resources with a few button presses that creates problems not just for him but the rest of his family and other people are going to have to pick up the slack.
The teatotalers would've loved you. But then we prohibit something, and we get mobsters having machine gun fights on Main Street about black markets. No thanks.
This isn't a gambling problem. It's a "why wasn't she a good enough judge of character to not have his kids". I'd like to solve that one too, but I don't know how. Not my problem. Not yours, feel free to not pick up their slack.
> These ventures being allowed into the system of capital creates incentives for as much of these problems in society as possible from the perspective of the proprietors of these ventures in order for them to extract the most capital profits that they can.
The initial prohibition (and the naivete of the legislators) caused that. Rather than digging deep and becoming subject matter experts on the regulation of gambling (and we have quite alot of history and learning materials for this), they passed the buck until it managed to be legalized in a half-assed manner.
You elect bad legislators (so do I, there are no good candidates).
> What is good for society?
We're no longer in a "what is good for society" phase of civilization. Even if I agreed with you, I wouldn't waste political capital trying to be anti-gambling. It's just bad strategy.
That ship sailed by 1980 or so. I was a kid then, and largely unaware of it at the time. If you invent time travel though, don't show up in 1978 or whatever, it'd need to be the 1950s or 1960s to have any chance at all of fighting that battle. The seeds of universal gambling in the United States were sown way back when.
Long story short: undermining fundamental human rights to fight a war you lost before you started sounds like a foo...
Lobbying (especially US-style lobbying) is a shortcut around democracy for the rich and powerful.
People should be electing their representatives based on what they will do for them. Instead they choose who gets bought. As a result, I have one vote but Charlie McBucks Inc. has 10 million.
> Is it that you don't bother to exercise those same rights yourself,
It's a game only the extremely wealthy can play, and you can't lobby to abolish lobbying anyway.
> Is it that you just dislike it when other people exercise their rights? Is it that you don't bother to exercise those same rights yourself?
Do you think this works as well when you replace "exercise one's rights" with "bribe politicians"? Let's see:
"Is it that you just dislike it when other people bribe politicians? Is it that you don't bother to bribe politicians yourself?" Hmm, not as punchy.
Another way to put it is: "what's wrong with rich people having orders of magnitude more power than you? Is it that you don't bother to already be rich?"
> Let's call it lobbying and make it legal and legitimate
And we can keep the overt cash payouts. We just launder the funds thru campaign chests and revolving-door, high salaried jobs (as a lobbyist, consultant, etc).
It's only natural that the campaign purchase several million copies of your self-published book to give out to influence voters! And of course the campaign should hire your brother-in-law's ad firm, you already know what their quality is like!
Agreed, what a way to sour a decent message with an awful example.
> Government, acting in the best interest of their citizens, were trying to curb an addictive substance. CEO of generic tobacco / drug / oil / gambling company, realizing that this would hurt their profits, decided that the best way forward was to effectively bribe those in power to put their company's profits over the well-being of society.
If this is true, I'd like to thank the author for inadvertently pointing out the real source of the sports gambling problem: people like Jason Robins.
We don't have a sports gambling problem, we have a greedy CEO bribing lawmakers problem.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I disagree that Robins is to blame. If the system enables this kind of behavior, there will always be someone willing to take advantage. If not Robins, then the next shameless profiteer.
I dont disagree that the main problem is systemic/political but all systems have flaws, people should always have a higher moral standard than simply following the law. Robins is to blame but not alone.
All this indicates is that the problem is at the system level. It doesn’t mean the actor is somehow less culpable just because “someone else would have done it anyway.”
Correct. There are also plenty of people who realize that while things are possible within a system, they choose not to do them for moral / ethical reasons.
Ah yes, the famous "if it’s not me someone else would do it therefore the system is to blame and not me". What a great logical fallacy. Your actions remain immoral even if there is plenty of other people ready to be as immoral as you are.
Both. We need both. Robins should be punished and the system should be fixed. Obviously. It's absolutely wild that we had to arrive here instead of starting here.
Personal responsibility is a good principle to live by but a dogshit principle for system design. It's a transparent but common ploy by the corrupt: "let's not fix the system and instead toss a few scapegoats to the plebs while we continue to rob them blind."
That’s mixing cause and consequences. A society is shaped by its members not the other way round. The law can punish the most egregious transgressions. It won’t set the global standard. Education and social behaviour set the standards. If you want behaviour to disappear, stop treating them as acceptable.
If we can agree that humans are imperfect, systems help nudge people towards more perfect.
I sure wish I had perfect willpower to avoid bad foods. But, alas, I am imperfect in that regard so I create a system that prevents bad foods from being in my house. The end result is that my behavior trends toward more perfect than had that system not be in place.
Moral philosophical discussions are fine and we can lament about the moral shortcomings of ourselves and others, but I think the systems argument is more pragmatic in creating real changes in behavior and outcomes.
There is something deeply troubling about the sentiment "if I'm incentivised to act a certain way, that is the way I will act". This is not how normal human beings think, and it is not the type of human being that society should be designed for.
This doesn't seem like a fair characterization of what happened. I don't intend to shill for Draft Kings or anything, but lawmakers weren't bribed into changing anything. The Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports gambling, and that was based on a lawsuit brought by Chris Christie as governor of New Jersey, not on behalf of Internet gambling sites, but because he was pissed that Nevada casinos were allowed to host sportsbooks but Atlantic City casinos were not.
> Since 2016, FanDuel and DraftKings alone have donated more than $2.6 million to state politicians and political parties, according to data maintained by OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog. The companies have spent another $114 million to try to influence state ballot measures to legalize sports betting.
> Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.
> “It is time for your state to add iGaming,” Jason Robins, the chief executive of DraftKings, told lawmakers at a recent conference that his company sponsored. “Not in the future, but now.”
> “We needed a national strategy,” Mr. Kudon said in an interview, recalling his thought process at the time. “We need to go out there and pass 10, 15 bills and get ahead of this.”
> Mr. Kudon and his clients assembled an all-star team of lawyers and former government officials, including Martha Coakley, who had been the attorney general of Massachusetts.
> By the end of 2017, 19 states had passed bills legalizing fantasy sports. Almost all were written with help from Mr. Kudon’s team.
> Comments from the justices — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts, who in private practice had represented the American Gaming Association — suggested they were likely to overturn the federal ban.
And before you move the goal-posts, I'll note that this is just part of what is openly available. We recently found out about Clarence Thomas illegally accepting gifts from wealthy individuals. To assume that these lawsuits win or lose in a purely ethical, academic way without outside influence seems contrary to the evidence.
Greedy CEO, greedy business owner, rich Nazis, foreign govt, there is no reason to focus the message on the variable in the room. The problem is greedy lawmakers who accept brides, full stop.
Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.
>Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.
One-sentence simple solutions to one of the most complicated problems humanity faces. How do you propose to do that? Lawmakers are in charge of their own rules. There is no incentive to change their own incentive structure from within.
Well, the brides aren't actually legal, they are just very difficult to prove.
Unless we want to make political donations illegal, how do you prove a donation to a politician as a bride instead of support for the politician whose politics you agree with?
One could make a claim that stuff like student loan forgiveness is unethical if it benefits those who voted for the party. Is it not illegal to use tax payer money to pay for votes? I think if any politician said, "anybody who votes for me will get a bonus in your tax refund this year" we would have no issue seeing how that is unethical.
I used quotations around the term bribe for a reason. By definition, if it's legal, it's not a bribe although it may walk like a duck and quack like a duck. One of the issues is an incentive problem: those who have the power to make it illegal are also those who benefit the most from it being legal.
>Unless we want to make political donations illegal
I think this is displaying dichotomous thinking. There's a lot of room between a political donation free-for-all and making political donations illegal. In between there are many proposals for a more mitigated approach. One being Lessig's idea of "Democracy Vouchers"[1]
I think any reform to the process such as democracy vouchers are just a shell game. Ok, that money can only go to candidates or issue campaigns. Meanwhile other money will be spent in multitude of ways to shape public opinion. Where do the DNC and RNC get money from? What can they spend on? Just to name one of many entities with skin in the game that can't be funded by the democracy vouchers.
These reforms are going to end up just changing to rules to help one side or the other. Whether or not the ideas were formulated originally with that intent, by the time they get implemented they will be bent for that intent.
Sure, and other systems would be needed to provide the necessary guardrails. At no point did I allude to the idea that one simple approach would be a panacea.
Whether that decision is in the best interests is a matter of opinion. They did what representative democracy encourages, which is to have a dialogue with their representatives.
Lobbying is cause promoting. You look for invested parties and plead your side. It’s fundamental to running society where groups want representation. I think you’re mixing lobbying with bribery. Bribery is illegal.
Using saved up money to execute your agenda is a fundamental feature of civilized society. Before money, basic transactions had to have goods exchanged on the spot. Money is a simple debt agreement that has been written in a commoditized form so that the creditor can easily trade it at their convenience, with other parties who can delay their dues for longer. It is just commoditized social obligation. Some people have a lot of it, because in their or their ancestors past, they racked up a lot of social obligation. It’s still just people who are due favors, calling them in.
Petitioning your elected officials is fine in most people's eyes. I think a lot of people may have an issue when money is equated to petitioning through various mechanisms. It's exacerbated in a society with economic systems that tend to amplify wealth inequality, leading to political inequality.
Counterpoint: savvy populist candidates can get traction without spending nearly as much money as their well-lobbied counterparts.
A widely-held stance is that lobbying needs to be a lot more illegal than it is, but the people who have the power to make it illegal are also the people who benefit from it. Nevertheless many of us random people who don't work in government would love to see this stuff made illegal.
Reading the text literally, it just says that the CEO opened a dialog that helped pick laws the lawmakers liked but didn't harm draftkings.
Lawmakers consulting with people with experience in what they are trying to regulate is generally a good thing.
There is a reading of this story where draftkings helped lawmakers make better laws. It doesn't take much sceptisism to read it differently admitedly, but the plain text doesn't state that.
People who engage lawmakers and public officials have a chance of shaping policy. Doing so is using the system as it's designed, so unless you have some specific criticism about the legitimacy of policy that came out of that engagement, it's not really clear to me how you could make a reasonable claim that will "make the world worse."
Generally speaking, the major problem isn't that some people do this (though some do in bad faith). The larger problem is that most people don't (and even fewer do so as concrete problem solvers).
The vast majority of the time the reason your ideas are dismissed are because people don't see the value in them. Oftentimes, the easiest way to show the value is to build a vertical slice of that idea and show it to folks.
In highly-regulated environments, this may not be an option, but for the vast majority of engineers, testing out different wordings, getting more seniority, or making allies will take a lot longer than producing a small prototype that can show the value.
I think the analysis of why people don't like your idea should be saved for post-prototyping. The prototype should be a reasonable amount of effort, no 6 month projects ignoring the value you're being asked to produce, but more like a 1 or 2 day project when the workload is low.
A good manager will encourage this sort of prototyping and not force you do it in secret. If you are having to build your prototypes in secret because people will prevent you from doing them, then you should be job hunting, because the place you're in doesn't trust you enough for you to thrive.
I suspect that after "debugging" many types of real-world problems, you will find the root cause is poor relationships. Or more specifically, you are not really part of some group or community that you are trying to influence.
I definitely am not good at being part of groups but my suspicion is that if you put time into trying to work on the exact things they are working on, then you may understand where they hang out and what their day to day problems are.
I skimmed the article, so not sure that it hit on this point. But "solve your problem" might be better understood as "join with people doing things, solve their pain points." You're making those pain points to be yours. Even better if you can join multiple teams of people over time doing roughly similar things and identify common pain points.
The physical therapist example is horrible. As someone who has seen many, the majority are quacks who are unwilling to say "I don't know what the problem is."
Especially those that probe and say "I feel a knot" after telling them where it hurts. I guarantee that if I'd gone in with forearm pain, but didn't tell them which arm, they would find the knot in the wrong arm about half the times.
(/Rant)
My beef with articles like these is it's not easy to find the right granularity when to stop. My real problem often boils down to "I need to eat and have a roof over my head."
I read it, and I feel now like I feel after watching a TED Talk. Which is to say, like I've just wasted a little chunk of my life.
Most of the time, your "real problem" cannot be directly solved, which is why you have another big problem to worry about. The engineer in the story is not getting his ideas accepted. If he was the CTO, his ideas would be accepted. Therefore, he can solve the real problem of seniority by becoming the CTO! How does he do that (eventually)? Maybe by proving he has great ideas, and he does that by implementing some of those ideas.
Oops, we made a circle.
So the real question is, how can we solve today's big problem without solving the "real problem"? Going ahead and implementing the guy's idea without permission is actually not a terrible way for him to get noticed, if it's a very good idea (which the exercise will also provide some insight on too).
There are a lot of theories out there but very few real life examples.
If I tell facts about myself to 10 people, I am sure everyone draw their own lessons based on how they perceive the world. AND there is nothing wrong with that!
People creating self help content think they are creating a rule book for everyone to follow. But I know for a fact based on my experiences that there is no such thing. These articles would sound much better if they phrase it like - I had X problem, I did Y to resolve them, and since then Z is my core belief in life. That I can respect even though I may not agree.
Not my tempo. If you feel the same, consider my attempt "rescue" the potential of the post by making two points:
1. Writing out a hypothesis in a sentence has a lot of value. It aids clarity, testability, and communicability.
2. Distilling each hypothesis down to one word, despite its risks, also called "chunking", has two major kinds of benefits: (a) information processing (sometimes referred to as neural efficiency or cognitive efficiency) and (b) learning & adaptation
This is actually bad advice for the "marketing professional" case for two reasons in my opinion;
* Author directs his client (?) to create hypothesis out of thin air and start testing them. This is how you loose time and money. The missing step in between is observation before hypothesis creation.
* In a workplace setting, the #1 thing you should do is to ask for feedback from your supervisor, incase you feel something is wrong or you have a performance problem and don't know what's wrong.
This is ringing very true for us, and a way we've been looking at a few things with our start-up in the last few weeks.
For example, we make an EEG headband to improve the efficiency of deep sleep, and this involves the challenging task of capturing brain activity through electrodes that are both comfortable and long-lasting, for consumer use.
We have a design which works, but we need to improve on it. Electrode design is a huge area of research at universities, etc.
Just the materials required to make an electrode (CNTs, ag/agcl, gold) are costly to work with.
We moved from asking "how can we make electrodes" to "how can we quickly and cheaply iterate on electrodes"? This lead us to a new material which we can use in prototyping, and we can then transfer this learning to use the more common materials as we move to production, when it is cost effective to use the material we decide on in the end.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadExample from the post: Engineer is thinking about doing a thing without permission. Why? Engineer thinks nobody accepts his ideas. Why? 5 possible answers. We could ask "Why?" again and get another step down (the author doesn't do this and instead proposes jumping into tests right away, which I think is still at least a level too high). One answer given: Engineer thinks his ideas are good, but they are bad. Why? Engineer probably isn't validating their ideas against feasibility, business outcome, maintainability, etc. Why? Engineer might be arrogant or inexperienced with real business settings vs. university/hobby projects. Now we have a root cause we can address and then move back up the chain.
When you can't ask "Why?" anymore without it being silly, that's when it's time to run tests and propose solutions.
5-whys is a linked list. Sometimes, things don't have a single cause. One mental model I find useful, while harder to apply, is to see things as a web of dependency. What are the whys for this layer of problem. What other problems are also implicated by the "why". i.e. A graph
It’s a pretty useful way of representing things (although I personally prefer indented bullet points).
But notice that they don't fit the GP's explanation at all. As strange as that may sound, causality is not unidirectional in a complex system. You are losing data by coercing it into that, and that data is quite often relevant to how you fix a problem, even if it's not commonly relevant for identifying the problem.
For example, given a wet floor, 5-why tends to give a single reason, e.g. because it rained, and people may drill deeper into why it rained. My intention was to search broadly, i.e. what could also cause wet floor, the weather, a burst pipe, a road cleaning truck, a nearby fire, etc, and also to search adjacently, e.g. water outage due to burst pipe, flooding due to rain, etc. This will quickly expand the searching surface.
It helped me to see the river instead of flowing downstream. e.g. Engineers was drowning in "tasks", it is not uncommon to have solutions along the line of work harder, pay down tech debt and hire more within the engineering org. But upon searching, the cause might be anywhere between lacking product market fit, broken and interdependent processes, fragmented and over specialised teams and tooling, and religious pursuit of growth, which has nothing to do with engineering in a traditional sense.
That being said, you always have to avoid fooling yourself when building logic diagrams. It's easy to do.
In the past year, I started a new role as a head of engineering for an existing team. I literally spent the first month asking "why" about nearly everything. The most common answers ended up being "I don't know, it's what we do", which was closely followed by some justification that boiled down to being a workaround for some anti-patterns. E.g. Q: "Why do we log this error at DEBUG level?" A: "It happens so often that it fills the logs when we log it at a higher level". Me: :(
Most common type of answer I've received, which is a bit of a bummer.
In theory logging should be more efficient than stats, but in practice, we use logging frameworks that are fractionally as complex as our stats frameworks, and at any rate nobody reads logs and probably haven't for at least ten years. Once your cluster size is more than about 3 servers you need aggregated logs. What we read is the output of log aggregators, and log parsing libraries are doing a lot of work. Way more than the ingestion side of a telemetry service, which is parsing a very simple message schema.
I'm always a little surprised how much engineers undervalue graphs until they see one that catches problems. I'm not entirely sure where that comes from, but I've known a few who have trauma from bad graphs causing drama. There's a lot of human factors around charting and most developers are largely blind to human factors concerns, even as they catch themselves making category errors with bad charts.
All the while dodging the following scenario. "We just have to ask... What is it exactly that ya do here?"
Viewing the world as a direct line of causal relationships is called, "making a story." You can take it all the way back to the beating of butterfly wings if you'd like. It's also quite ineffective at addressing systemic issues and connected relationships.
An alternative approach to post-hoc rationalization is to look into the factors that contributed to a particular outcome (or recurring set of related outcomes) and determine relationships between them: there are often systematic reasons for particular outcomes and not a singular event. Systems are not set up like dominoes in neat rows. It's usually much more messy than that.
You can follow such a causal chain a few steps and say, "look I found the root cause!" But you won't solve the problem if you don't identify the systemic factors that lead to such situations. Even if you apply a solution to that root cause, you may find the outcome happens again -- it just finds another way around your patch, sort of like a cartoon of character trying to fix a leak in their plumbing by covering it up. To really solve the problem they need to turn the water off at the entry point, reconsider the plumbing set up, and fix their budgeting so that they allocate funds to preventative maintenance. Instead we get to laugh as they get squirted in the face over and over as they try more elaborate schemes to plug all of the holes.
An example of a common factor in software development: leadership that prefers features shipped on a deadline. They will do anything to ship by the deadline. There may be a right way to do things to prevent errors in the system but not acknowledging this when an issue comes up, by jumping to conclusions about root causes, means your team will be constantly fighting fires in your production environment instead of taking the time to write specifications and modelling them and properly testing things. You may feel good about finding that one line of code that caused the outage. You may apply the patch and be the hero of the week. But it's not a matter of if another outage will happen but when because you haven't addressed the confounding factor that causes situations like that to happen again and again. If it doesn't get addressed then the leadership will find other post-hoc rationalizations for why these situations keep happening where the development team is, "getting slow."
To take it back to the article: if people are ignoring your advice constantly, are you going to find out why by stepping back through a causal chain to a root cause? What if you did find a satisfying cause and you address that issue. Does that mean people will listen to you or will you only get that one idea through before you notice the pattern repeating?
I like the idea the article suggests of trying several things. It could be an issue like discrimination: notice that all of your colleagues are young, white, and male presenting? Does anyone else on your team that doesn't fall into that demographic get their ideas through? Maybe that's only part of it though. It could also be true that your ideas need work as well. Trying a few things may make all the difference.
Ask why, but also look at the surrounding environment and see if you notice any recurring patterns or relationships around the incident. After all, you don't find the source of disease by following the individual; you need to find the patterns that lead you to the wells.
That's... 5 Why's. If that's not happening for your 5 Why's, you can try to start steering things more assertively. The worst 5 Why's I've ever encountered looked a bit like children wearing mommy's dress shoes. I've had pretty good luck railroading such milquetoast RCAs into something at least moderately productive. There's always one person with an agenda but in my experience most people seem relieved that anyone else wants the reins. You don't even have to be in charge, you just have to keep drawing attention back to the person with the most coherent comments.
You have a problem, what does it look like? Do we have other problems that look like this? Is there a concrete action we can take to reduce the impact of this problem moving forward (ie, what aspect of the 4th why can we actually fix)? Are there other actions that would be more effective? Or more timely? Can we split the difference and half-fix a problem instead and circle back the next time it happens?
That's all 5 Why's. Or at least, the ones I attend.
[1] https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/26/8/671
[2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2016-005849
> The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO, the English National Health Service, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Joint Commission and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective. Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy.
> In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS). It also plays a key role in Lean (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology: The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123)
> This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely).
> ...
> It is clear from the tree diagram that the causal pathway related to the wristband printer is neither the only relevant cause of the incident nor indisputably the most important. A serious effort to solve the myriad problems that gave rise to this incident would have to tackle a number of other causal pathways as well.
> ...
> There are many ‘correct’ ways a team might use ‘5 whys’ to assess even this one incident. And it is unlikely that any two teams would independently arrive at exactly the same results. This subjectivity is critically important because ‘5 whys’ focuses on only one root cause at the end of one causal pathway.
> ...
> Targeting only the most distal cause
> Not only are users of ‘5 whys’ limited to one root cause per causal pathway, but they are also limited to selecting only the most distal cause (conventionally, the fifth ‘why’). There is, however, no logical reason to assume that this is always the most effective or most efficient target for intervention.
> Actually, if it were possible to magically place a 100% effective risk control at any one point on the tree diagram, it would be best used on a proximate cause. For instance, making it impossible to administer medication without checking the wristband would render all the more distal causes moot for the purpose of preventing a recurrence.
> And, while 100% effective risk controls are seldom available, an action plan that includes a proven26 (if certainly imperfect) intervention like a well-designed bar-code reader with a forcing function for patient identification (ID) is more likely to prevent another serious ‘wrong patient’ medication error than switching to a well-designed printer.
> This is not to suggest that more distal causes are not appropriate targets for improvement efforts. In the example presented in figure 1, for instance, there is clearly a profound need to change the culture from one that is task...
The advice isn't even consistent. He says that you need to break things down into a "one-word" problem, because anything bigger than that is too hard and abstract. And yet, his little template to fill out "I don't have a ___ problem, I have a ___ problem" gets filled out with single words in each instance!
"I don't have an acceptance problem. I have a communication problem".
The latter is somehow preferred to the former. Why?
[0] Or banal workplace philosophy if I'm feeling uncharitable.
A bad manager is a "funnel" and you know exactly what they do.
Likewise, I'll share some of the problems I'm working on with my reports. You don't hand these problems down though, you just talk about it and solicit feedback & ideas.
Just try hard to please the recruitment team to join a company, then you'll be given problems to be solved.
https://www.annieduke.com/newsletter-monkeys-and-pedestals-f...
Ah yes. "Here's a tip to make the world worse."
Not that they're wrong, but that's such a disappointing example.
The one-word problem here could be 'lobbyists' or 'lawmakers' or 'bribery' or 'exploitation'. It could even be just as the article said: 'relationships'... But it sure isn't this article, written after the fact, with no hint of actually condoning said behavior other than failing to pass moral judgment.
If you think about it some more, you might be glad that the author reminded us about this. Our lawmakers sell us out to fossil fuels, big banks, corporate media, telecomms, polluters, etc, and then tell us it's raining.
Democracy is hard. If participation is limited to voting in an election, the public interest will be ignored.
Fully true. The public is relegated to - at best - a veto vote on corruption, which they rarely use (and are rarely informed as to why they should. Thanks press!).
Instead of fantasizing a creative, insightful and genius solution, it shows a glimpse of how the real business world works.
Everyone likes to rant about lobbyists and lobbying, which are strange names for something Thomas Jefferson chose instead to call "petitioning government for redress of grievances".
Is it that you just dislike it when other people exercise their rights? Is it that you don't bother to exercise those same rights yourself, and so they shouldn't be allowed to do so either? Or maybe it's just that they're better at it and that seems unfair to you?
The lottery proceeds fund public schools.
Because a corresponding amount of general budget funds were diverted away from schools, the inference is untrue.
See, we can all play this shit game.
Yes, without doubt.
> who is disabled
Even worse.
> It taught them gambling pays, and makes them more likely to lose money in the future.
By definition gambling is losing money in long terms (otherwise it's investing, not gambling). A disabled is less likely to recover after a financial disaster.
Seems to me your definition is a bit lacking.
Frankly you come off as purposefully obtuse for the sake of arguing.
For the next time you cherry pick anecdotes to try and support some outlandish position, I suggest you at least be specific while doing so. Unless of course that lack of specificity was intentional and this was meant to be a “gotcha”.
How much has your cousin spent on lottery tickets, in her life?
I agree, in a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with the concept of lobbying. I would go out on a limb (well not quite a limb, I have family members that were lobbyists) and say the majority of lobbying that occurs in the US is actually good.
But where it's bad, it's really bad. The loudest and most influential voices are the ones with the most money, and sometimes that's good, but a lot of times thats bad. They promise golden parachutes and shower politicians with money so much so that even if the politician gets burned, they are promised a career at the lobbying firm or with one of the "hookups". Again this is bad, because now instead of being accountable to the constituency, our politicians are accountable to their benefactors.
There's a lot more reasons this is wrong, but this is the primary gist. I hope we can all agree this is an issue.
These people -- the blogger, his friend, etc -- could easily 'exercise' their rights, as you say, in a good way, or a bad one. They choose a bad one, for greed. There's nothing better to dislike than "somebody did a bad thing on purpose."
Here are some entire books written by people who studied this issue in great depth:
This shit is killing people, no exaggeration. The rise in inequality over the last 50 years is rotting America's heart and soul out. US style lobbying is right at the center of it.Gambling prohibition only prevents gambling regulation. You don't get to regulate illegal things.
God save us from busybodies trying to protect us from ourselves.
You think there is no more gambling occurring in a world where you walk into a convenience store and there is a slot machine or whatever, or you watch a sporting event and 50% of the advertisements are for gambling, as opposed to a world where those things are not the case?
> You don't get to regulate illegal things.
Illegal things are regulated, these things are not allowed, do them and you will punished. The regulation is very clear.
> God save us from busybodies trying to protect us from ourselves.
I was once having a conversation with someone on this topic of gambling, and the problems it incurs to members of society, and by extension society as a whole. She had personal experience with a former spouse having a gambling problem.
She said something to the effect of “Well yeah, it’s not good, but you can’t legislate morality.“
I kind of nodded in agreement like, yeah, fair point.
But upon later reflection it occurred to me that what are laws if not the legislation of morality? That’s literally what laws are.
Should we not bother being busybodies having laws preventing theft and murder?
After all people still commit these acts should we not bother with regulations against them, attempting to protect people from themselves, and society from the negative downstream effects?
Ah but you say, it’s a victimless act. Let people have their big gulps, let people gamble. It is a victimless act until it isn’t, like speeding or drunk driving.
If a father downloads an app and blows through his families monthly resources with a few button presses that creates problems not just for him but the rest of his family and other people are going to have to pick up the slack.
These ventures being allowed into the system of capital creates incentives for as much of these problems in society as possible from the perspective of the proprietors of these ventures in order for them to extract the most capital profits that they can. (“Capital profits” meaning profit in the most narrowly defined sense in terms of numbers in a database. Is someone involved in this stuff profiting in anyway spiritually or emotionally in the way that comes from providing something of value to society?)
That is why it is de-generate. Nothing good is being created / generated.
It’s an extractive, predatory venture.
What is good for society?
It used to be a chicken in every pot.
Now a casino in every pocket?
Come on….
No. They're not regulated. Everyone knows where to get them anyway, or knows someone who knows where to get them. And they do.
But those things are more dangerous for everyone. You don't get to make them safe by demanding inspections. You don't get to make sure no one's cheating. It acts as a huge drain on revenue, instead of the taxable economic activity it should be.
Your "regulation" is some delusional DEA Czar talking about protecting kids from drugs and winning a war against an abstract concept. Meanwhile those kids buy dirty street shit mixed with rat poison and elephant tranquilizer.
I'm not a big fan of regulation, mind you, but I think I speak even for the pro-regulation folks when I say "that's not the kind of regulation anyone wants or that anyone means when they use the word".
> But upon later reflection it occurred to me that what are laws if not the legislation of morality? That’s literally what laws are.
That's not what laws are for. It seems like it to naive people. But then they try to prohibit things people are going to do anyway, even when those things won't harm others if done.
And, if any of this just rubs you the wrong way, you can go read up on the extensive real world experimentation where we discover just how awful those attempts go.
Laws are for "making things better". It may be that people who rape toddlers deserve to be executed, but if you make that a law you don't make the world better... you just end up with more dead toddlers. Laws drafted badly create perverse incentives.
> Ah but you say, it’s a victimless act. Let people have their big gulps, let people gamble. It is a victimless act until it isn’t, like speeding or drunk driving.
No one said you can't prohibit drunk driving. Though, even for that, there are limits to how intense this prohibition can be. The thing you can't do without it being lunacy, is outlawing the drinking itself.
> If a father downloads an app and blows through his families monthly resources with a few button presses that creates problems not just for him but the rest of his family and other people are going to have to pick up the slack.
The teatotalers would've loved you. But then we prohibit something, and we get mobsters having machine gun fights on Main Street about black markets. No thanks.
This isn't a gambling problem. It's a "why wasn't she a good enough judge of character to not have his kids". I'd like to solve that one too, but I don't know how. Not my problem. Not yours, feel free to not pick up their slack.
> These ventures being allowed into the system of capital creates incentives for as much of these problems in society as possible from the perspective of the proprietors of these ventures in order for them to extract the most capital profits that they can.
The initial prohibition (and the naivete of the legislators) caused that. Rather than digging deep and becoming subject matter experts on the regulation of gambling (and we have quite alot of history and learning materials for this), they passed the buck until it managed to be legalized in a half-assed manner.
You elect bad legislators (so do I, there are no good candidates).
> What is good for society?
We're no longer in a "what is good for society" phase of civilization. Even if I agreed with you, I wouldn't waste political capital trying to be anti-gambling. It's just bad strategy.
That ship sailed by 1980 or so. I was a kid then, and largely unaware of it at the time. If you invent time travel though, don't show up in 1978 or whatever, it'd need to be the 1950s or 1960s to have any chance at all of fighting that battle. The seeds of universal gambling in the United States were sown way back when.
Long story short: undermining fundamental human rights to fight a war you lost before you started sounds like a foo...
People should be electing their representatives based on what they will do for them. Instead they choose who gets bought. As a result, I have one vote but Charlie McBucks Inc. has 10 million.
> Is it that you don't bother to exercise those same rights yourself,
It's a game only the extremely wealthy can play, and you can't lobby to abolish lobbying anyway.
Is that what paying others to do something makes me? Better at it?
So then it follows Stan Kroenke is the best multi-sport athlete the world has ever seen.
Do you think this works as well when you replace "exercise one's rights" with "bribe politicians"? Let's see:
"Is it that you just dislike it when other people bribe politicians? Is it that you don't bother to bribe politicians yourself?" Hmm, not as punchy.
Another way to put it is: "what's wrong with rich people having orders of magnitude more power than you? Is it that you don't bother to already be rich?"
Seems to be called lobbying in the US.
And we can keep the overt cash payouts. We just launder the funds thru campaign chests and revolving-door, high salaried jobs (as a lobbyist, consultant, etc).
> Government, acting in the best interest of their citizens, were trying to curb an addictive substance. CEO of generic tobacco / drug / oil / gambling company, realizing that this would hurt their profits, decided that the best way forward was to effectively bribe those in power to put their company's profits over the well-being of society.
If this is true, I'd like to thank the author for inadvertently pointing out the real source of the sports gambling problem: people like Jason Robins.
We don't have a sports gambling problem, we have a greedy CEO bribing lawmakers problem.
The system is people just like the CEO - it’s a people problem
Personal responsibility is a good principle to live by but a dogshit principle for system design. It's a transparent but common ploy by the corrupt: "let's not fix the system and instead toss a few scapegoats to the plebs while we continue to rob them blind."
Besides, complaining about immoral people doesn't fix the problem. Changing the law might.
I sure wish I had perfect willpower to avoid bad foods. But, alas, I am imperfect in that regard so I create a system that prevents bad foods from being in my house. The end result is that my behavior trends toward more perfect than had that system not be in place.
Moral philosophical discussions are fine and we can lament about the moral shortcomings of ourselves and others, but I think the systems argument is more pragmatic in creating real changes in behavior and outcomes.
The “system” enables any kind of behavior - people are free to attempt anything they can imagine, consequences are applied after the fact
These are not mutually exclusive.
> Since 2016, FanDuel and DraftKings alone have donated more than $2.6 million to state politicians and political parties, according to data maintained by OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog. The companies have spent another $114 million to try to influence state ballot measures to legalize sports betting.
> Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.
> “It is time for your state to add iGaming,” Jason Robins, the chief executive of DraftKings, told lawmakers at a recent conference that his company sponsored. “Not in the future, but now.”
> “We needed a national strategy,” Mr. Kudon said in an interview, recalling his thought process at the time. “We need to go out there and pass 10, 15 bills and get ahead of this.”
> Mr. Kudon and his clients assembled an all-star team of lawyers and former government officials, including Martha Coakley, who had been the attorney general of Massachusetts.
> By the end of 2017, 19 states had passed bills legalizing fantasy sports. Almost all were written with help from Mr. Kudon’s team.
> Comments from the justices — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts, who in private practice had represented the American Gaming Association — suggested they were likely to overturn the federal ban.
And before you move the goal-posts, I'll note that this is just part of what is openly available. We recently found out about Clarence Thomas illegally accepting gifts from wealthy individuals. To assume that these lawsuits win or lose in a purely ethical, academic way without outside influence seems contrary to the evidence.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-l...
No, we didn’t.
See https://reason.com/volokh/2023/06/22/justice-alito-shouldnt-...
Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.
One-sentence simple solutions to one of the most complicated problems humanity faces. How do you propose to do that? Lawmakers are in charge of their own rules. There is no incentive to change their own incentive structure from within.
Potential solutions could include direct democracy, line item veto, or maybe both?
I don't claim to have a solution, and that should be no reason to not address the topic of what problem society needs to solve.
Perhaps the problem is the system that makes such "bribes" legal.
Unless we want to make political donations illegal, how do you prove a donation to a politician as a bride instead of support for the politician whose politics you agree with?
One could make a claim that stuff like student loan forgiveness is unethical if it benefits those who voted for the party. Is it not illegal to use tax payer money to pay for votes? I think if any politician said, "anybody who votes for me will get a bonus in your tax refund this year" we would have no issue seeing how that is unethical.
>Unless we want to make political donations illegal
I think this is displaying dichotomous thinking. There's a lot of room between a political donation free-for-all and making political donations illegal. In between there are many proposals for a more mitigated approach. One being Lessig's idea of "Democracy Vouchers"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%2C_Lost#Democracy_vou...
These reforms are going to end up just changing to rules to help one side or the other. Whether or not the ideas were formulated originally with that intent, by the time they get implemented they will be bent for that intent.
Sure, and other systems would be needed to provide the necessary guardrails. At no point did I allude to the idea that one simple approach would be a panacea.
True. Also if the money enriches the candidate thru means other than cash-in-hand, the bribery may be legal and is just as unethical.
Groups which don't have a lot of people in them, but do have a lot of money, and can't find anyone willing to voluntarily advocate for them.
Bribery ought to be illegal, but in practice it's legal - e.g. corporate donations.
Counterpoint: savvy populist candidates can get traction without spending nearly as much money as their well-lobbied counterparts.
There is a reading of this story where draftkings helped lawmakers make better laws. It doesn't take much sceptisism to read it differently admitedly, but the plain text doesn't state that.
Generally speaking, the major problem isn't that some people do this (though some do in bad faith). The larger problem is that most people don't (and even fewer do so as concrete problem solvers).
Let's delve into this "problem" of addictive behavior and think about root-cause-problems.
- people are unhappy in their lives and fall into addiction
* they have too many opportunities for abuse
* there's something really wrong in their lives that needs solving
- lawmakers fail to make laws that reduce addiction
* lawmakers are persuaded by lobbyists that act for profit, because the latter have good arguments or the former are easy to convince/bribe
* they don't understand addiction because they are ill positioned for that job
Above can be broken down further into core problems, that should be tackled. My point being, it's not necessarily a bad example.
In highly-regulated environments, this may not be an option, but for the vast majority of engineers, testing out different wordings, getting more seniority, or making allies will take a lot longer than producing a small prototype that can show the value.
I think the analysis of why people don't like your idea should be saved for post-prototyping. The prototype should be a reasonable amount of effort, no 6 month projects ignoring the value you're being asked to produce, but more like a 1 or 2 day project when the workload is low.
A good manager will encourage this sort of prototyping and not force you do it in secret. If you are having to build your prototypes in secret because people will prevent you from doing them, then you should be job hunting, because the place you're in doesn't trust you enough for you to thrive.
I definitely am not good at being part of groups but my suspicion is that if you put time into trying to work on the exact things they are working on, then you may understand where they hang out and what their day to day problems are.
The physical therapist example is horrible. As someone who has seen many, the majority are quacks who are unwilling to say "I don't know what the problem is."
Especially those that probe and say "I feel a knot" after telling them where it hurts. I guarantee that if I'd gone in with forearm pain, but didn't tell them which arm, they would find the knot in the wrong arm about half the times.
(/Rant)
My beef with articles like these is it's not easy to find the right granularity when to stop. My real problem often boils down to "I need to eat and have a roof over my head."
Most of the time, your "real problem" cannot be directly solved, which is why you have another big problem to worry about. The engineer in the story is not getting his ideas accepted. If he was the CTO, his ideas would be accepted. Therefore, he can solve the real problem of seniority by becoming the CTO! How does he do that (eventually)? Maybe by proving he has great ideas, and he does that by implementing some of those ideas.
Oops, we made a circle.
So the real question is, how can we solve today's big problem without solving the "real problem"? Going ahead and implementing the guy's idea without permission is actually not a terrible way for him to get noticed, if it's a very good idea (which the exercise will also provide some insight on too).
What are the features involved in success, which ones are levers that can be pulled.
Realizing everything is an abstraction for another thing that is yet another abstraction is in a way a freeing realization.
If I tell facts about myself to 10 people, I am sure everyone draw their own lessons based on how they perceive the world. AND there is nothing wrong with that!
People creating self help content think they are creating a rule book for everyone to follow. But I know for a fact based on my experiences that there is no such thing. These articles would sound much better if they phrase it like - I had X problem, I did Y to resolve them, and since then Z is my core belief in life. That I can respect even though I may not agree.
[1] https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,forma...
1. Writing out a hypothesis in a sentence has a lot of value. It aids clarity, testability, and communicability.
2. Distilling each hypothesis down to one word, despite its risks, also called "chunking", has two major kinds of benefits: (a) information processing (sometimes referred to as neural efficiency or cognitive efficiency) and (b) learning & adaptation
* Author directs his client (?) to create hypothesis out of thin air and start testing them. This is how you loose time and money. The missing step in between is observation before hypothesis creation.
* In a workplace setting, the #1 thing you should do is to ask for feedback from your supervisor, incase you feel something is wrong or you have a performance problem and don't know what's wrong.
For example, we make an EEG headband to improve the efficiency of deep sleep, and this involves the challenging task of capturing brain activity through electrodes that are both comfortable and long-lasting, for consumer use.
We have a design which works, but we need to improve on it. Electrode design is a huge area of research at universities, etc.
Just the materials required to make an electrode (CNTs, ag/agcl, gold) are costly to work with.
We moved from asking "how can we make electrodes" to "how can we quickly and cheaply iterate on electrodes"? This lead us to a new material which we can use in prototyping, and we can then transfer this learning to use the more common materials as we move to production, when it is cost effective to use the material we decide on in the end.