LESSWRONG
LW

All of Mike Conant's Comments + Replies

Accountability Sinks
Mike Conant30

While it’s easy to see how a rigid procedure can strip agency from frontline workers—whether at Schiphol Airport in 1999 or on an airline gate—there’s a deeper point worth emphasizing: processes are not villains in themselves but the tools we use to achieve collective goals.

At their best, formalized workflows capture institutional knowledge, ensure consistency, and guard against the whims of any single individual. When they “misfire” in rare edge cases, that usually means one of two things: either the process wasn’t designed to handle that scenario, or the... (read more)

Reply
1Atharva Gupta
I agree—processes are an efficient way to offload the computation/analysis, from being done in the moment (when time is most valuable) to being done during the planning/designing stages (when time comes very cheaply). 
Can group identity be a force for good?
Mike Conant30

Thank you for your thoughts!  I enjoyed reading. My first reaction is how you equated tribalism and group identity, so it is worth clarifying what you mean here?   I believe that a group's identity is not necessarily tribal, though it may very well be used as a tribal weapon.  Simple examples are the creation of gentiles, atheists, or Huguenots as "identities" defined via the jews, theists, or Catholics, respectively, as derisive identities. These labels are payloads for both blame or pride depending on who is owning them. Your thoughts?

I ap... (read more)

Reply
1Eric Neyman
It's true that I didn't draw a distinction between tribalism and group identity. My reason for doing so was that I thought both terms applied to my three examples. I thought a bit about the distinction between the two in my mind but didn't get very far. So I'm not sure whether the pattern I pointed out in my post is true of tribalism, or of group identity, or both. But since you pressed me, let me try to draw a distinction. (This is an exercise for me in figuring out what I mean by these two notions; I'm not imposing these definitions on anyone.) The word "tribalism" has a negative connotation. Why? I'd say because it draws out tendencies of tribe members to lose subjectivity and defend their tribe. (I was going to call this "irrational" behavior, but I'm not sure that's right; it's probably epistemically irrational but not necessarily instrumentally irrational.) So, maybe tribalism can be defined as a mindset of membership in a group that causes the member to react defensively to external challenges, rather than treating those challenges objectively. (I know that I feel tribalism toward the rationalist community because of how I felt on the day that Scott Alexander took down Slate Star Codex, and when the New York Times article was published. I expect to feel similarly about EA, but haven't had anything trigger that emotional state in me about it yet. I feel a smaller amount of tribalism toward neoliberalism.) (Note that I'm avoiding defining tribes, just tribalism, because what's relevant to my post is how I feel about the groups I mentioned, not any property of the groups themselves. If you wanted to, you could define a tribe as a group where the average member feels tribalism toward the group, or something.) Identity is probably easier to define -- I identify with a group if I consider myself a member of it. I'm not sure which of these two notions is most relevant for the sort of pattern I point out, though.