There's this (largely unpracticed) idea on Wall St that every once in a while you should sell your entire portfolio and then decide which stocks you actually want to buy back. It's a way of dealing with the Endowment Effect which says that people have ...
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@inthehands @polotek @kims The police are broken at the institutional level. I think that we as a society need to identify which functions of police we want to keep, like incident response, administration of justice, etc, and create new institutions for these purposes that operate in fundamentally different ways from the existing police force. Or in other words, we need to abolish police. The police refuse to be held accountable and any attempt to do so is bound to fail, as so many have before.
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@sanedragon @polotek @kims
A ground-up rethink from scratch is something I’d like, too, but if we actually want to get institutional problems fixed, it usually requires a frustratingly iterative and piecemeal approach. Thus something like and independent board that can simply not rehire (as opposed to actively fire) specific officers sounds like a great idea to me. -
@inthehands @polotek @kims I get it, but given the power of police "unions" I don't see anything like that happening any time soon. Where I would focus attempts at incremental change is in creating the alternative institutions and reassigning tasks to them.
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@inthehands @polotek @kims Like, when someone calls 911 and asks for a welfare check on their neighbor or perhaps someone is having a mental health crisis in public, the person who responds is from an institution primarily concerned with helping people instead of from an institution primarily concerned with getting people in trouble and shooting them.
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@sanedragon @polotek @kims
Yeah, 99pi did a fantastic episode on perhaps the most successful example ever of creating a new institution and transferring responsibilities to it and away from the police: https://99percentinvisible.org/?s=freedom%20houseBUT…
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@sanedragon @polotek @kims …even that is an incredibly uphill battle. Here in Mpls, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, there was a citywide referendum to create a “dept of public safety” that would do exactly what you propose. It was a horrifying, scorched earth campaign that not only defeated the amendment but entrenched an awful mayor.
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@inthehands @sanedragon @kims police unions are very powerful. Not just on their own, but also because powerful political entities use them as muscle. So preserving police power is in the interest of a lot of other parties as well. There will always be staunch opposition to police reform.
Anyway, the only reason I asked the question above is that I'm not sure stack ranking is a good way to approach this specific issue.
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@inthehands @sanedragon @kims what's most likely to happen is that the police will use it to get rid of people they don't like. e.g. people who rock the boat or push for improvements internally. And the oversight board would end up spending their time trying to get good people rehired.
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@kims @inthehands I hear you. I would only add a little perspective. Stack ranking isn't done to induce fear. I think that's a fable that employees like to tell themselves because they want to paint executives uniquely villainous. Stack ranking is done for business reasons. It is true that these policies have a negative impact on employees. And it is true that a lot of executives don't *care* about that impact. But it's not personal. (That makes it worse imo.)
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@polotek @inthehands @sanedragon
My thought wasn't to do it like stack ranking (performance-based). Do it randomly such that everyone gets reviewed (like selling the whole portfolio)I agree that police reform is near impossible. This idea was mostly a response to my stomach lurching any time I see a story about a cop who gets publicly caught doing something and turns out to have a 20-page disciplinary record
Rather than asking, "Should we fire him?" ask, "Is he someone we should hire?"
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@kims @inthehands @sanedragon for sure. That makes sense. Thank you for giving me more context.
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@polotek @inthehands
I can split the middle on this one. I'm sure there are places where it's simply considered best practices, and it can be rationalized that the people who are let go were a bad fit, and fear motivates people, etc .But the guy they adopted it from? Jack Welch was famous for terrorizing his employees. He thrived on the culture of fear that he created. Also, he proved to be a giant fraud, but that's a whole other conversation...
Thanks for making me dig deeper on this
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@kims @inthehands yeah I think we're saying the same thing. True villains do exist. But the reason these things become pervasive is usually due to the more banal form of cargo-culting. The only reason I try to push on this a bit is that I think focusing on malicious intent doesn't give us the right levers to push for change. Thanks for being open to it. I'm not sure this was actually worth me taking up your time and attention, but I appreciate it.
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rateexportpilotreplied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek @kims @inthehands <feel free to ignore, I might not be adding anything here>
As a non-technical person at a tech company (and in a legally-required role; i.e., I'm not worried about being fired), the stack ranking thing seems reductionist and arbitrary. To boil complex individuals with complex relationships down to a single dimension for the sake of creating an accountability sink strikes me as wrongheaded.
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Marco Rogersreplied to rateexportpilot last edited by
@rateexportpilot people love to talk about all of these complex dimensions until it's time to set salaries. And then they definitely want it boiled down. And the number better be the exact same as whoever is standing next to them. (Or higher of course. Because I'm special and unique, but in a way that's definitely better than that person.)