UntItle[D]

https://fs.blog/2014/06/avoiding-stupidity/

"Change might come from legislation, or collective action, or continued feminist advocacy, but it’s folly to imagine it will come from companies themselves. Our capacity to burn out and keep working is our greatest value."

Farnam Street blog, https://fs.blog/2018/11/entropy/

“ On an engineering subreddit we asked participants many questions, one of which concerned the importance of the common flu. For half of the participants, we said the solution to the problem was engineering (e.g., better engineered equipment in bathrooms) and for the other half psychology (e.g., better psychological messaging strategies on equipment in the bathrooms). We found that for those on the subreddit who highly identified with engineering, and thus had psychological motives to see engineering as important, rated the common flu as a significantly more important problem when solved by engineering than when solved by psychology. Those who did not highly identify with engineering did not show the same pattern. We can think of how all of us might exaggerate those things that our identities and ideologies are great at solving. Accordingly, we propose that we may need an additional derivation to the classic phrase, “If you have a hammer every problem looks like nail” with “If you have a hammer every nail looks like a problem.” “

tl;dr important to listen to and give some weight to first hand perspectives of employees interfacing with real people (agents/ reps). Benefits of diversity of perspective extends to benefits from different functional backgrounds. Be wary that data-centric obsession does not lead to overoptimizing for the easily quantifiable - e.g. sameness based on available data - at the expense of the unquantifiable human/ ethical e.g. echo chamber / accidental externalities to society  "Broadly, Ms. Powell suggests that many of Silicon Valley’s problems can be laid at the feet of an *engineering-and-data-obsessed monoculture that invites little input from people outside the bubble.* ... “I don’t think that everyone has an equal voice,” Ms. Powell said in an interview. “Even putting aside broader issues around gender diversity, ethnic diversity or class diversity, there’s also an issue around people’s educational backgrounds. *If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, you really miss something when those people don’t have an equal voice at the table.”*  She added: “It’s a monoculture of thought, and that’s a real problem.” ... Ms. Powell does not have any easy or obvious ideas for how to address tech’s monoculture. She thinks of her book as starting a conversation. But any solution, she said, will involve “a fundamental, bottoms-up cultural change” — and one that we should not expect to see overnight."

Turkle attributes the loss of empathy largely to their inability to navigate the online world without losing track of their real-time, face-to-face relationships. In her view our technologies place us at a remove, which changes not only who we are as individuals but also who we are with one another.

The Little Prince