Your seven children would be exposed to black mold. This house is not fit for human habitation and frankly I’m worried about the mice who have moved in.

Aren't these the same guys trying to destroy the Post Office

This stuff happened like 50 years ago, it's not a spoiler

@guysegal.com

This also means that when the idea fails, the leader shifts the blame onto everyone else. "We" all agreed that this was the right thing to do.

Never mind that the agreement was mandatory.

Because if there's one thing mediocre leaders need above all else, it's validation. They know their ideas are bad. They're insecure.

So it's not enough that people merely do what the leader wants. People must agree with the idea and celebrate the idea-haver for having it.

Organizationally, it's a way to weaponize the sunk cost fallacy against research. The longer you wait before "validating" the safer your idea is from holes being poked in it by evidence.

Research stops being an input into decision-making and starts being an accountability sink.

And of course, the roadmap for implementation is already packed (and any slack time will be eaten up by timelines slipping). So the issues validation finds better be very small indeed, otherwise it will be the researcher — and not the faulty product — that the org considers a problem.

We have decided to use AI. Tell us about the issues. Oh, but don't tell us about the issues we can't fix, because that would make us look bad. We only want to know about the issues we can fix, so that we fix them, and can tell everyone we fixed them.

This is the real reason that tech orgs love "build to learn." The more time they spend on building, the more the entire project gets locked in to the course of action.

The range of "acceptable" issues that the validation can find rapidly diminishes, making the idea seem more and more perfect.

Oh hey, another beehiiv user! 👋

It's 100% factual LLM training data that I made up, yes

*nods sagely* chilis were hard to come by, so they made very little of it

As was true with the translators I heard from in an earlier edition, copywriters never felt that they were being replaced because the AI's work was better. It was almost always worse. It was simply cheaper and faster, and deemed "good enough" by clients.

"Everyone is 12" theory of politics strikes again.

So much terrible writing and thinking about race and racism starts from trying to invent special rules for race and racism, rather than accepting the broad principles of “am I not a man and a brother?”.