The problem is that you don't know how different people who take the survey make their choices. Some people who are in a relationship that's shorten then 2 years will answer one of the other options. That makes the whole data set difficult to interpret because you don't know a a particular person made their decision.
Alright full disclosure - if you had just said "You should probably have included a "show me the answers" option", I would had agreed and moved on. But instead your tone of ~Bah, everything is ruined!~ I found quite jarring*, especially since I had already gained some useful and surprising information off of despite its limitations. This isn't a particularly scientific poll for many reasons, I don't know how to tease apart strategies that are popular with strategies that lead to long term success which is what the qualifier was for - if I figure out a way to do this some day, I'll be more careful in its implementation.
*I'm not sure why, this LessWrong after all.
The poll is screwed up because it lacks a "just show the answers field".
Additionally the dichomy of being in a relationship lasting greater than 2 years and I'm not in a relationship lacks cases that exist in reality.
I was going to redo the poll a few hours after I made it, but I didn't think this was a big deal. Just choose I'm not in a relationship or other - neither is an interesting field anyway.
I think the yuck-ness is pianoforte611's point.
Not exactly, see my response to OrphanWilde.
The most common anecdote that I've heard is of the form "I really wanted this person and I pursued them persistently until they settled for me"
My fiance might describe it that way; she's more or less stated that she feels I'm out of her league. I'd define it less (which is to say, not) as "settling" and more "noticing that this relationship is emotionally healthy for me".
The whole concept of "settling" is... wrong. The goal of dating isn't to find the "best", by some criteria, person you can find, which is unfortunately how many people tend to see it. The goal of dating should be to find your complement; somebody who enhances you (and ideally, who you enhance as well).
[Edited: Typographical error corrected]
I agree vehemently and should have probably used a different phrasing. What I was really getting at is that in most anecdotes that I've heard - one person is significantly more enthusiastic to start off with (and I don't think this is necessarily a problem).
I'd love to see the results of a large survey on how successfuly married people found their partner. Is the "love finds you" meme based in anything real? The most common anecdote that I've heard is of the form "I really wanted this person and I pursued them persistently until they settled for me".
That's what the Research request pages are for, but did you check Google Scholar?
Paywall
I have no direct experience with management consulting.
My opinions are formed by: my own observations of office politics; reading Dilbert; reading Robin Hanson; listening to stories of my friend who is an IT consultant. But I trust the other sources because they are compatible with what I observe.
Maybe it depends on a company, and maybe the one where I work now is an unually dysfunctional one (or maybe I just have better information channels and pay better attention), but most management decisions are completely idiotic. What the managers are good at optimizing for, is keeping their jobs. Even that is not done by making sure the projects succeed, but rather by destroying internal competitors.
For example, one of our managers was fired because our IT support department was actively sabotaging our project for a few months and we had no budget to seek help elsewhere; so we missed a few deadlines because we even had no servers functioning, and then the guy was fired for incompetence. The new manager is a good friend with the IT support manager, so when he got his role, our IT support department stopped actively sabotating us. This was all he ever did for us; otherwise he almost completely ignores the project. He is praised as a competent leader, because now we succeeded to catch up with the schedule. That was mostly because of the hard work of our three most competent developers. One of them was recently fired, because we had too many people on the team. And that's because the new manager also brought a few developers from his old team; they do absolutely nothing, officially because they are experts on a different programming language, but we secretly suspect they actually don't even know programming, so they don't contribute and mostly don't even go to work, but now they are part of our budget, so someone else had to go. Why not pick randomly?
How is it possible that such systems survive? My explanation is that nerds are really bad at playing power games (actually so bad that they don't even realize that such games exist or need to be played; they may even object violently, which makes them really bad allies in such games, which is why no one will even try to ally with them and educate them). Instead our weakness is the eternal childish desire to be praised by a parent figure for being smart. So whenever shit hits the fan, the developers will work extra hard to fix the problem -- without even thinking about using that as a leverage to gain more power in the organization. Most nerds are too shy to ask for a pay raise, even if they have just saved the management's collective asses. So the managers can afford to ignore the technical aspects completely as something that happens automatically at a constant cost, and can focus fully on their own internal fights.
A few months ago I was 'jokingly' trying to get my colleagues to expore the idea of what could happen if the developers decided to form a union. How the management would be completely at our mercy, because they don't understand anything, are unable to hire a replacement quickly (it took them forever to find and hire us), and with the tight schedule any waste of time would totally sink the project. Even if we would use this power for goals compatible with the company goals, we could negotiate to remove a lot of inefficiency and improve our working conditions. But we could also all ask for a raise, and for the company this whole revolution would still be profitable. -- My colleagues listen to me, mostly agreed with some conclusions on an abstract level, and then laughed because it was obviously such a silly idea. They all live in the imaginary universe where your income and quality of life is directly proportional to your coding skills and nothing else matters. I was screaming internally, but I politely laughed with them. Now some of them are being fired, regardless of their competence and hard work, and more will follow. Har har. I don't worry about them too much; it will be easy to find another job. But it will be more or less the same thing, over and over again. They had an opportunity for something better and they ignored it completely. Worst case, if the plan would backfire, they would be in the same situation they are now.
As Plato said, one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. That's IT business in a nutshell.
That was a very entertaining read thanks.
Maybe it depends on a company, and maybe the one where I work now is an unually dysfunctional one (or maybe I just have better information channels and pay better attention), but most management decisions are completely idiotic
It is also possible that you aren't aware of most of what your management does. I'll take your word for it that many of their decisions that are visible to you are poor (maybe most of their decision are, but I'm not yet convinced). As for management consulting, I suppose that is an inferential gap that is going to be hard to bridge.
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I think the science/engineering-distinction used by Douglas Knight and Lumifer provides no good model, so you have to ask them.
It's both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean - science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.