Rationality Quotes June 2014

Tyrrell_McAllister

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

I disagree- you'd be amazed how inefficient you can be and still be profitable.

Constrained, not eliminated :-) If you have certain advantages -- e.g. you are a too-big-to-fail bank -- you can be horribly bureaucratic and nothing bad will happen to you for a long time.

Generally speaking, I think of the standard trajectory of successful companies as looking something like that:

Start as a lean mean hungry machine. Expand, grow fast.
Become successful, lazy and complacent. Life is easy.
Become fat, ossified, and arthritic. Sudden movements are not possible any more.
Become a dinosaur and either crater from being unable to adapt or be torn to pieces by new lean mean hungry machines.

I guess I have less faith in the constraint. Maybe its because I constantly work with companies who have been between stages 3 and 4 for a very long time.

As an anecdote, many years ago I worked with a fortune 1000 retail company whose inventory system was so bad that I was legitimately surprised they were able to operate and make money. ("According to this you have more shirts in inventory in one store in San Francisco than the entire population of California..."). Much of their IT resources were being eaten by building weird one-off work aro... (read more)

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