Nothing Will Ever Change

We strive for the post-scarcity Star Trek society, but we are heading toward the dystopic Star Wars universe where slavery and piracy are the norm.

Introduction

We are living in a world that is convinced we are on the cusp of the future.  Today we are going to talk about why this isn’t the case and why the more things change the more things stay the same.  In the post World War II 1950s, there was a similar feeling, with the majority of the population newly exposed to the logical conclusions of the 19th century: lots of new products and services available for the first time to the majority of people.  Things seemed to change a little then.  Electrification, affordable cars and trucks and air conditioning come to mind, though these are really just productivity enhancements, allowing people to work more and longer.  If increased wealth through more and longer work hours are changes for the good, it was good.  We are going to show why and how that was the last time, maybe forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future that things did change.

Human Nature

We think the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, et al., were pioneers in whatever they took up: logic, science, engineering and philosophy.  There are three reasons for this.  First, their societies were based on slave labor, so you had educated people sitting around with nothing to do but think deep thoughts.  Second, new subjects were everywhere and easy to look around and see something to ponder.  Third, the elites could record their thoughts.

Now, we have the completely opposite problem.  The average human being has more and better access to information than ever before.  The information superhighway of the 90s has devolved into trading racy pictures and conspiracy theories.  Here are the problems I see:

• The culture of ignorance is ascendant and rampant.  
• Belief is just as good as fact
• Education is suspect and not to be trusted.

Let’s expand on these points for a moment. There are swaths of people in this culture who grew up in the same place you did, have the same primary and secondary education as the rest of us who can’t speak or write.   These sections of society may not have the same access to higher education, but the primary and secondary education they are mandated to receive is not working.  This is failure in parenting, or lack of parenting, probably, and a willful acquiescence to ignorance.  

Rugged individualism is part of what got this country off the ground, but ignoring proven facts over something you read on facebook is counterproductive at best.  People who eschew the ‘jab’ or vaccination are invoking their belief over cold hard science.  Science  begs you to prove it wrong.  That is the only way we learn.  Your belief in science is not required.  A thing either is or it isn’t.  Conspiracy theories rely on supposition and coincidence.  There is nothing in the vaccine that can be used to track you.  That smacks of the ‘future is now’ attitude that we discussed in the introduction.  Meanwhile, the same people have to charge their cell phones three times a day because it is always in use tracking everywhere they go.

An ivy league PhD (or any PhD) makes you a contributor to knowledge in the subject of your expertise.  To obtain a PhD, you literally have to come up with new knowledge. In order to receive a PhD  an individual must defend this new knowledge against a panel of his or her peers, so it isn’t just a matter of passing tests.  In parts of this culture, education is not to be trusted.  This leads to the aforementioned conspiracy theories made up by people who don’t properly understand what is going on and why things are the way they are.

Speaking of education, MBAs are worthless.  Nobody has a generic ‘business,’ so a generic ‘business’ degree doesn’t do what you think.  This is not education, this is training, and not even good training.  Businesses provide a product or a service, they do NOT provide ‘business.’  Yes, you could make the argument that finance is general business, but that just shows that finance is not really a thing and should be taxed as 100% over about $100,000 per year for the people that do it, thusly avoiding the inevitable economic crash that comes every decade, and stopping the brain drain of smart people going into finance to make lots of money.

Business

Because business is not a thing, we don’t see innovation.  The smart people who get business training, quite literally don’t know what innovation is.  That results in people running businesses who have no grounding in technology or science so they can’t judge the difference between a great idea and a slick presentation by a salesperson.  We get ‘this is the way things have always been done.’  We see business people emailing spreadsheets.  We see ‘workflow’ thinking.  

Executives make engineering and technology decisions they do not understand.  This is why we have the prevalence of Salesforce and ServiceNow and SAP and Workday.  These things are amazingly, eyewateringly expensive, and only half done.  You still need a team of developers to finish any of them and you still have to host them yourself.  We already know these executives don’t know how to run a software company, so what makes them qualified to choose any of these half baked solutions?  If you are going to develop software, start from scratch and avoid the millions in licensing fees.  Since these businesses are now run by purchased software, there is very little development and thus no innovation.  Most technical jobs today are infrastructure or deployment positions, not development.  If your business is doing everything exactly the same way with the same tools as everyone else in your industry, how are you going to differentiate yourself?      

In order to have a successful company, it has to be run by people who know how to provide the product or service.  Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunkworks, and one of the most talented and successful engineers of all time, had a policy of only having an  engineer as a division manager.  Engineers can understand business, business people can’t understand engineering.  We know this because if they did understand it they would be designing airplanes instead of counting beans.  He also added that the Division Manager had veto power over all business decisions, guarding against the ‘just get it done’ attitude.

Human Resources

Human Resources (HR) is not your friend.  They are there to avoid lawsuits.  They exist only to have a place the CEO can point to when he personally, or the company, gets sued, so he can say “Here is our policy in writing, we have an entire department to make sure that everyone knows the policy and provide training to make sure they understand it.”

The problem with this is that HR values things that do not help accomplish the business’ goals.  They worry about being nice, and corporate fit and any number of ‘soft skills’ and have no interest in getting the job done.  From this point of view, they are incredibly misaligned with the goals of the business.  Remember that a business provides a product or a service, not avoids lawsuits.  

So we get lots of mindless people who don’t or can’t think for themselves attempting to run a business and of course failing.  The people who can get things done  are automatically ruled out because they want to talk about solving problems and how they would do that, instead of being nice, and chatting about whatever it is the HR manager wants to talk about.  Nietzsche, Schopenhour, Machiavelli,  Bonhoeffer and many more great thinkers all had something to say about being nice versus achieving your goals.  

Consulting

Hey business guys, the consultants don’t know anything that you don't know.  You attended the same schools at the same times with the same instructors and that is probably how you ended up with a consultant in the first place.  Consultants are there to bill hours, at hundreds of dollars per hour.  They are not there to fix your problem.  If you can’t fix your problem, and they aren’t any smarter than you, why do you think they can fix your problem?  This is how you end up with Salesforce and Workday and SAP and ServiceNow and every other silly thing they told you to install.  They can’t deliver software any better than you can.  They are business guys.  See the problem with business guys above.  

Conclusions

We, as a society, are on the wrong path.  We are heading toward the culture of the Idiocracy movie.  The tail is wagging the dog.  Business people make dumb decisions for short term gain and cost themselves long term.  Businesspeople don’t understand the things their business is doing.  They hire consultants to come in and show them, and end up with larger problems.  HR is turning away qualified, smart people because they don’t fit the ‘corporate culture.’  They are hiring people because they are personable, not because they can do the job.  They are hiring people according to skin color and gender instead of the ability to do the job.  

No, you can’t be successful if you can’t speak the language.  No, you can’t be successful until you are good, hopefully the best, at something, and yes it is hard.  No, AI is not going to fix anything.  Sabine Hossenfelder just broke news that plain old programming  reproduced AI ‘creativity’ with 90% accuracy for a fraction of the cost and complexity.  No, your YouTube PhD isn’t as good as a university PhD.  No, your MBA is worthless, unless you have some other skill to go with it.  No, being nice isn’t going to get you anywhere.  No, new is not bad, you just have to have the ability to look through the hype and see what the new thing really is.  No, your belief is not as good as my facts.  No, we aren’t going to agree to disagree, you will do as you are told until you can provide solid evidence that what you say is better than what I am already doing.  

A North Texas County, Collin, is going back to paper ballots.  Ignorance and distrust of the system and technology has moved us back 4000 years in elections.  The information superhighway is now used basically for racy pictures and conspiracy theories; we advanced plenty but in the wrong direction.  

Usually when I identify a problem I also propose a solution.  I don’t have a solution for this one.  Maybe it is religion, and the fact that belief is required.  If someone you like and trust (who is nice?) tells you a thing is fact, without proof, only belief, does that make it easier to believe other things that are as equally unlikely?

  Again, I don’t know what the problem is, but if it isn’t solved soon, this society is going to collapse. I suspect that many, even a majority would like to have words over some of their closely held and incorrect beliefs, and maybe even ones cited in this article.  I assert that it is time to end ‘being nice’ and tell some of these believers exactly what the facts are.  I think we need to start with business.