On 09/18/2016 11:05 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
On Sun, Sep 18, 2016 at 8:25 AM, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de wrote:
There also are duties, yes. I agree that rights are not enough. One can argue though that duties follow from the rights.
taking just the bill of ethics section on "certainty", if you define things in terms of "certain duties" you've already failed. if you are *certain* that duties will help fulfil a goal, you've moved into static bureaucracy without even realising it... and are thus moving automatically and subconsciously into being *unable* to react to changing circumstances, and thus, by definition, *will* be unable to fulfil the goal.
entropy has to be fought, basically. now, that's not to be confused with "duty" in the indian / ayurvedic context, which is best phrased as "doing your duty" i.e. "act with integrity". that's *completely* different.
... but if you're referring to "dividing a goal up into fixed duties" that to me is an *automatic* way to fail.
I’m not talking about precise, high-level duties / implementation details but more generally about the complement to rights in the European sense. What you say about the Indian/Vedic context seems like one low-level, more vague way to frame a duty, I am not familiar at all with Vedic ethics and Hinduism though.
What I mean is that a rights-based ethic with the added / consequent duty of working towards the implementation of the rights can work well. An ethic not based on rights can work equally well, probably with similar consequences.
Well, in a larger organization some simple complaints are easier to support and assess without disputes when there is a high-level policy. But you are not a large organization, so you don’t need one right now anyway.
did you know that visa (the credit card company) became highly successful world-wide without having a single manager anywhere across the entire organisation? when it was bought out it was transformed into the hierarchical top-down bureaucratic nightmare that it now is, but prior to that they had absolutely no management structure of any kind.
they operated entirely and exclusively - thousands of people across dozens of offices - in small groups of around 7 people.
I did not know that.
the myth that hier-ocracy is the only way to organise is just that: a myth.
i need to transform what i am doing into something that is more than just me, that can scale with integrity, in a way that is *not* susceptible to the untold damage caused by hierocracy, autocracy, democracy and meritocracy. the only thing that i have found so far which fits the bill is bob's work, which he's called "organised an-archy" i.e. "organisation in the absence of overarching authority".
I consider a flat hierarchy to be a hierarchy as well. Some people apparently don’t, so sorry if that was not clear. For example, Wikipedia has a hierarchy. It may not be perfect, but I doubt it would work without one. Anarchies don’t have a single person or only few people at the top, but they do, in my terminology, have hierarchies as well. It may be more clear to call it organization.
words like "policy" and "rights" and "duties" and "democracy" and "hierarchy" - these are all "sleepwalking" words that have countless examples showing us how badly and how drastically they're failing us. i do have to hand over control of the EOMA initiative to a responsible group at some point in the next ten years, but it will *not* be to a group that basically sleepwalks the EOMA initiative into oblivion.
Yes, they often go wrong. Disregarding them often goes wrong too. It depends on the implementation. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that rights *cannot* work as well as ideals. More relevant here is that an anti-harassment policy / code of conduct is so uncontroversial that having one helps and does not hurt for organizations.
I don’t think our opinions are far apart. I am quite happy with WP:NOTDEMOCRACY and consensus decision making. I am already critical of profit maximization or else I would not be here.
sorry if this comes as a bit of a shock, florian. there's an article on slashdot just come out "why aren't techies improving the world"? https://ask.slashdot.org/story/16/09/18/0152208/ask-slashdot-why-arent-techi... i didn't respond here (i am still dealing with flu, have been for 3-4 days now), and the comments got too large for it to be worthwhile responding.
Sorry to hear that. I hope you get better soon.
The slashdot discussion is interesting.
have you seen what elon musk is up to? have you analysed his behaviour at all? he's advocating that we convert all our cars to electric (when there isn't enough lithium, neodymium or copper on the planet to support a *fraction* of the conversions), which tells you that he has no idea or consideration of the environmental damage of what he's advocating. he's advocating that we "go to mars" and is setting up Space-X as a way to kickstart that. put these two things together, and we can logically deduce that he's basically "given up" on the people of planet earth.
all that power - all that money... and he's treating humans like test subjects for technology (and killing them on a regular basis with these "auto-pilot" systems aka "driver assist").
one of the goals that i have is to undo some of the damage caused by Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Samsung and Apple - as pawns of people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others - before it's too late.
do you *really* think that copying their power structures (which allowed them to dominate technology and cause people untold harm) would be a good idea? because i certainly don't!
this isn't something that i can tackle on my own: i can make a start, but to have it turn into one of the very organisations whose effects i am endeavouring to *undo* would be the absolute worst possible nightmare scenario.
l.
I do agree with you. It is interesting to hear about these issues; one year ago I still considered electric cars a great idea (which is what the TV and the politicians tell us here in Germany). Well, we’re also told that nuclear power is more of a problem than coal…