Holding poor performers accountable can lead to better government

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/holding-poor-performers-accountable-can-lead-better-government/400568/

One place government should mirror the private sector and improve, however, is how it manages its employees. My organization’s polling trust data, for example, shows that over one-quarter of Americans view holding employees more accountable for their performance as one of the top two actions the government could take to become more effective and trustworthy.

Large private sector companies like Walmart, FedEx and Home Depot invest in their people—establishing clear cultural values, employee development programs, and performance appraisal, enforcement and reward systems —and they have incentives that help remove poorly performing employees. 

Unlike the private sector, the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for employees. While most employees are doing good work on behalf of their agencies, some are underperforming and some need to be fired. This happens in every industry across the private sector. 

There’s Something Very Different About Harris vs. Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html

But there’s another axis that politics can polarize along: the basic worth of institutions. To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side “Woke Inc.” and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

Writes and Write-Nots

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

Cathedrals: Enormous Sacred Space

https://apricity.me/2024/10/22/cathedrals-enormous-sacred-space/

Joyful indeed, they smiled and hugged, celebrating the journey’s end. The singing was full and exuberant, their ebullient mood infectious. There was no energetic or frenetic shouting that I associated with Protestant charismatic worship. It was a measured exuberance. This time, being present at a cathedral—an ancient structure that I mostly associated with secular history and practices foreign to my Baptist roots—stirred my spirit. Next to the old gigantic stones, my heart was warmed. I cried tears of fond memory. The fervent faith of youth can be naively hopeful and sunny (pray and the world will bend to your prayers), but it also can be inspiring. The Spirit punctured through my assumptions and experiences, and touched me.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome without any of the ickiness of a class action settlement. A refrain throughout the fairness hearing was that releasing the rights of out-of-print books for mass digitization was more properly “a matter for Congress.” When the settlement failed, they pointed to proposals by the U.S. Copyright Office recommending legislation that seemed in many ways inspired by it, and to similar efforts in the Nordic countries to open up out-of-print books, as evidence that Congress could succeed where the settlement had failed.

Of course, nearly a decade later, nothing of the sort has actually happened. “It has got no traction,” Cunard said to me about the Copyright Office’s proposal, “and is not going to get a lot of traction now I don’t think.” Many of the people I spoke to who were in favor of the settlement said that the objectors simply weren’t practical-minded—they didn’t seem to understand how things actually get done in the world. “They felt that if not for us and this lawsuit, there was some other future where they could unlock all these books, because Congress would pass a law or something. And that future... as soon as the settlement with Guild, nobody gave a shit about this anymore,” Clancy said to me.

How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html

Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”

Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?

Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.