> Why do we fear being lied to? Because we don’t like others manipulating our beliefs. But our fear of being misled by false news pales by comparison to our fear of suffering total “mind-control”.
Funny thing is that because we fear being lied to, we pretend otherwise when we ARE being lied to.
There is also no group other than big pharma that have paid as much criminal fines in the history of commerce. So instead of cultivating a religious faith in whatever they are pushing, be skeptical and do some due diligence.
Pharma is a massive sector of the economy though, partially because it has delivered so many miracles. Of course there are bad actors in such a large part of the economy, but the idea that there is some better alternative we should turn to is not supported by any evidence at all.
> American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc. (hereinafter together "Pfizer") have agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the Department of Justice, to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products, the Justice Department announced today.
Most people here would not download third party libraries without a thorough audit, even if the application purpose is essentially frivolous. I would not buy anything from a company with this kind of criminal record without a full due diligence of what they selling, including conflicts of interests of the FDA reviewers involved.
Financial products sold by the banks must be treated that way too.
You could find similar judgements in any large area of the economy. You, me and everyone else buys from companies without a full due diligence of what they selling on a nearly daily basis.
We all buy gas, food, paper products and basically everything from conglomerate companies that have done horrible, criminal things. That is just how the world works.
Your comments are a bit harsh and naive. One cannot look to paid entertainment professionals for moral and ethical guidance. Nor can we hold them to higher standards than mere mortals.
A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute.
To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this.
Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.
In my experience it is the opposite, very few people qualify for "knowing their stuff well". Let me put it this way:
Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently.
This combination is extremely rare, and I think survivorship bias that you mention mostly exists due to original business goals not being defined formally enough - i.e. people commonly valuing "execution as an activity" instead of "execution is getting from A to B". You can execute while failing many times over because you lack knowledge or understanding. You can get recognised and praised for execution because nobody bothered to validate that you actually got the result.
This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
> this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.
Could you expand on this argument more? My first reaction was negative ("Why would the world be worse if more people felt safe sharing their feelings??") so I would like to hear more and challenge my assumptions.
For my part, I'll point to research that suppressing emotions increases risk of suicide[1] and that many more men die from suicide than women[2]. I'm willing to hear out an argument that the world would be worse if these tragic deaths hadn't happened but it requires extraordinary evidence and argumentation IMO.
I'm not advocating for either side here, just want to explore my ideas for a bit.
During some rough patches of my life, I found solace in being vulnerable with my friends and speaking about how I felt.
At other times, taking a more stoic approach worked wonders. Learning to notice feelings and emotions without them leading you into a spiral of debilitating self-pity or self-loathing, for me, is the ultimate life skill. And to be honest, I only could really progress with such a skill in relative solitude.
The way I have it now, the approach of reaching out for help with mental space is more like going to a doctor. There's a certain threshold of suffering that needs to be reached, for you to take deliberate actions. Practising mindfulness and all the stoic narratives is more like doing fitness. It helps with the ongoing, everyday, low-key pain, as well as prepares you for the bigger issues in the future.
As someone who spends most of his life and work focused on more openly expressing how I feel and wanting others to do the same, I'm curious to explore the other side as well.
I think one of the largest conflicts that I've encountered with this work is that a lot of culture, philosophy, religion, etc., seems to advocate for more emotional suppression. That the goal is to detach and have a quiet, steady, peaceful existence, absent of conflict, but also absent of too much connection.
And if those groups advocate for more suppression, to start to express more can create some deep conflict and possibility of ostracism or excommunication. For example, many people consider it to be an emotional affair if you say how you honestly feel to someone who is not your exclusive romantic partner. Many families consider it the ultimate betrayal to share family secrets with those outside the family. Etc.
So when I think of more men doing it, I worry that if not all men did, then culture could have that strong clash. Maybe we already have it. Some advocating to open up more, to be more aware of how we're feeling, and some advocating to go in the opposite direction.
I would love to talk about this more and I worry this post is already long enough for now :-)
from my personal reflections, it's hard to distinguish sharing feelings and simply complaining and becoming more and more negative in nature
sharing simply amplified the negative content within, it's like there is a negative thread in my hand, the more you share and put it into words the more you are following that thread going into a state where you shouldn't be
same goes for complaining how the life is unfair
and when it came to positive feelings, it seemed much better to do "little things" than sharing the feelings
(Since we're discussing counterfactuals and could-have-beens)
In a macabre way, maybe suicidal ideation due to suppressed emotions is nature's way of managing male populations? What if men stopped killing themselves because they felt safe sharing their feelings? What if that led to testosterone fueled "musth" rages where men started to go on rampages just to let off steam? That world would be worse for everyone involved.
I don't think that to be the case testosterone fuelled raging is an effect of suppressed emotions. Imo sharing of feelings would lead to more soft, feminine personalities which is the direction we are slowly heading towards.
Emotional suppression isn't the same as not sharing your feelings, per the linked article.
I don't think the world would be worse if men started sharing their feelings, but I do believe there are societal factors that force men into stoicism, and that it's not feasible for change to start with men alone.
I guess that depends whether they do it on the way up or on the way down w.r.t. productivity. If people offed themselves before they became a burden on others that might be a positive for society.
It's not so much the folks who suck it up and carry on, though they might be doing themselves a long-term disservice; it's the ones who project it outwards that are doing most of the harm in the world. Boys and girls, of course.
Markets are about information processing. The information set is huge and price update has bandwidth limitation. GPT-n like systems perhaps can increase that bandwidth by orders of magnitude. That is in some sense "seeing the future".
Funny thing is that because we fear being lied to, we pretend otherwise when we ARE being lied to.