Monthly Archives: December 2010

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Do nothing, get paid: the “Michelangelos of work avoidance”

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Interesting piece at Forbes here about a sort of person we’ve all known – or maybe even been, to a greater or lesser extent* – in our working careers: they are the “Michelangelos of work avoidance” [via BigThink]:

Work-avoidance Michelangelos know how to stay idle while suffering no consequences or, in some cases, even getting promoted. June lasted in her job for more than a decade before finally being laid off, and when her termination came it had little to do with her lack of productivity. The office was automating her job.

One of her skills was spending little time at her desk or anywhere near the department where she supposedly worked, so that her bosses didn’t even think about her much. Out of sight, out of mind, you might say. “If people don’t think of you, they can’t give you work,” Abrahamson says. Other ways to accomplish that: Arrive at different, unpredictable times of day. Work from home. Set up your schedule so that you frequently change locations.

[…]

If your boss does manage to track you down and try to give you some work, you can strategically deploy a kind of good-natured cluelessness. “The principal here is that you try to give work to a person and come to the conclusion that they can’t even understand the instructions,” Abrahamson explains. In such a case most bosses will figure it’s easier to do the work themselves.

If you perform a specialized function within your office, you can distort the time it takes to get it done. Among June’s supposed jobs was keeping time sheets for her department’s staff. No one else knew the system she’d set up or how long keeping the data took. Thus she could make a task that took minutes appear to consume hours of toil. People with computer expertise who work among Luddites can easily exploit this tactic.

Then there’s what Abrahamson calls the anticipatory screw-up. Make it clear to your boss, in the most pleasant way possible, that you will fail at the assignment she wants to give you. “You don’t have to fail,” advises Abrahamson. “You just have to be clear that you’re going to fail.” Most smart bosses will then give the job to someone else.

Not really surprising that as complex a system as corporate capitalism should have provided niches for freeloaders, nor that human beings – with their innate gravitation towards maximum rewards for minimum outlay – should have taken to them so successfully.

And before you think I’m beating on capitalism alone, I’m pretty convinced that this sort of behaviour goes all the way back into the dawn of history; I suspect shamanism may have arisen due to one or two people per tribe being smart enough to see a way to game the social system. (“Sorry, can’t go hunting with you this week, guys; waaaaaay too busy communing with the gods. But they did tell me that y’all might want to try your luck beyond the third hill to the North…”)

[ * Not me, obviously; I was always a model employee wherever I worked before becoming freelance. SRSLY. ]

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The real cognitive dissonance

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“You keep using that phrase; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I’ll raise my hand to a mea culpa on this one; cognitive dissonance is a concept whose discovery and explication I owe to none other than William Gibson, and I doubt I’m alone in that among the readership of Futurismic.

Thing is, like a lot of complex psychological concepts, the vernacular conception of cogDiss doesn’t quite match up with the original idea. Take it away, Ars Technica:

…within psychology, [cognitive dissonance] describes a somewhat distinct process, where people are forced to reject an item they actually like. Given this bit of awkwardness, people are prone to dealing with it in a fairly simple manner: they conclude that they never really liked the item that much in the first place. This finding, which implies that behavior can drive belief instead of the other way around, has remained controversial, but researchers are now claiming to have identified the neural activity that drives cognitive dissonance.

[…]

As expected, the authors are able to demonstrate cognitive dissonance in action: once an individual has chosen against an item, their ratings of it plunge. This effect was much, much smaller when a computer made a choice for an individual, although the later personal choice offered these subjects restored a bit of its impact. So, the researchers have confirmed both the previous work on cognitive dissonance and that of its critics: some fraction of the effect seems to be driven by people actually having stronger preferences than they state, but not all of it.

This is – like most neuroscience at this point – simply the first step on a long road of discovery, and things will doubtless turn out to be yet more complex. But in case you’re wondering why this research matters…

… the study pretty clearly shows that behavior isn’t driven simply by what we believe; our actions can feed back and alter our beliefs. Which, really, shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given the degree of post-hoc rationalization that most people engage in. However, as the authors note, this fact seemed to have escaped those who developed the economic systems that assume that people are rational actors.

I believe the word is “zing”.

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The fate of the post-geographical nation-state

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Via Tobias Buckell, a reiteration of a question we’ve asked here before – if a tiny nation-state’s territories are wiped out by climate change, such as the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, what becomes of that nation-state as a political and social entity?

What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?

[…]

“We’re facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states,” Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. “We’re confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework.”

This is probably the very thinnest thin end of the wedge, too. Sadly for the Marshallese and others like them, it won’t be until similar issues start hitting bigger nations that the legal framework will be looked at; until then, the transition from citizen to unrepresented and unprotected climate refugee will become increasingly ubiquitous, and noticed only by the majority – by us – as a steady increase of blank and desperate faces in the internment camps at the border.

We’ve made our bed, but we’re making the servants lie in it first.

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The end of the PC era is 18 months away

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So claims this piece at ComputerWorld, anyhow, parroting the findings of a market research firm about the unit-numbers of smartphones and tablet devices to be shipped when compared with sales of “traditional” personal computers [via SlashDot]:

It may be seen as a historic shift, but it is one that tells more about the development of a new market, mobile and tablet computing, than the decline of an older one, the PC. Shipments of personal computers will continue to increase even as they are surpassed by other devices.

IDC said worldwide shipments this year of app-enabled devices, which include smartphones and media tablets such as the iPad, will reach 284 million. In 2011, makers will ship 377 million of these devices, and in 2012, the number will reach 462 million shipments, exceeding PC shipments. One shipment equals one device.

I think an end to the dominance of the PC is pretty inevitable, and indeed has been happening for some time – I don’t know many people whose home computer isn’t a laptop, for instance, which seems indicative of a desire for computing-as-convenient-commodity rather than computer-as-installation, than computer-as-machine.

But will they vanish completely from the consumer marketplace? I’m not so sure… I use a desktop tower by choice, because I like to be able to build, maintain and upgrade my hardware myself, but that marks me as a relic of sorts, and an inheritor of my father’s engineer-esque attitudes to computers*. But as devices get cheaper, more powerful and more disposable, that impetus may fade awy.

Whether or not disposability is a path we should be pleased to follow is another question entirely, of course…

[ * My first PC was his handed-down 8086, which he insisted I help him assemble and test; with hindsight, that’s one of those incredibly pivotal moments in a life. ]

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Distractions and derailments

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There are so many damned layers to the Wikileaks story that it’s getting hard to keep track of them all. Assange’s arrest yesterday here in the UK has – quite naturally – refocussed attention on the figurehead rather than the phenomenon, and my inner conspiracy theorist – along with that of about half the internet, so far as I can tell – can’t help but think “well, that’s convenient”.

Complications arise from the nature of the accusations levelled at Assange, however; rape is a contentious issue at the best of times, and when combined with a highly polarising political story like Wikileaks… well, let’s just say there’s a whole lot of FAIL going on, mostly involving pro-Assange folk leaping to the assumption that the charges are trumped up, and a subsection of those folk springboarding from there into the realms of casual and institutionalised misogyny – you know, “liberal laws mean women can call rape whenever they’ve decided they didn’t like the guy after all”, that sort of thing. Assange becomes the victim of the narrative, while his accuser becomes a lying manipulative cock-tease… which is pretty much the standard narrative surrounding rape cases of much smaller profile than this one, sadly. So here’s some much needed sanity from Kate Harding at Salon:

Look, for all I know, Assange’s primary accuser does have CIA ties. Perhaps it was all a setup from the beginning. Perhaps she is lying through her teeth about the rape. Anything is possible. But in the absence of any real evidence one way or another, we’re choosing to believe these guys? Or at least this guy at Firedoglake, who says he’s “spent much of [his] professional life as a psychiatrist helping women (and men) who are survivors of sexual violence” — giving his post a shiny veneer of credibility, even though it’s a pure regurgitation of Shamir and Bennett’s — but segues from there into an indictment of the accuser’s post-rape behavior. She socialized with her attacker again! An expert like him can tell you that real victims never do that.

The fact is, we just don’t know anything right now. Assange may be a rapist, or he may not. His accuser may be a spy or a liar or the heir to Valerie Solanas, or she might be a sexual assault victim who now also gets to enjoy having her name dragged through the mud, or all of the above. The charges against Assange may be retaliation for Cablegate or (cough) they may not.

Public evidence, as the Times noted, is scarce. So, it’s heartening to see that in the absence of same, my fellow liberal bloggers are so eager to abandon any pretense of healthy skepticism and rush to discredit an alleged rape victim based on some tabloid articles and a feverish post by someone who is perhaps not the most trustworthy source. Well done, friends! What a fantastic show of research, critical thinking and, as always, respect for women.

As hinted at above, I’m very much of the instinctive opinion that the charges against Assange are dubious, if not completely fabricated; it really is astonishingly convenient for a lot of people who’d like him out of the way, and the inherent controversy of the crime he is accused of makes it even more so – just look at how the “did he/didn’t he?” aspect of the story is taking the foreground, not to mention providing great ammunition for Assange’s enemies.

But as Harding points out, we don’t actually know… and as such we should STFU and let the law run its course, while keeping a keen eye out for dodginess. My message to pro-Wikileaks people would be this: talk about the leaks, talk about the legality of the leaks, talk about the wrongdoings they expose, but shut up about Assange’s charges. Although the relationship is complicated, Wikileaks != Julian Assange – what the organisation does and what its figurehead does are not necessarily connected. And if you really believe the guy is being framed, then surely you’re playing into the hands of his framers by letting them steer the dialogue and turn it into a very public pillory?

For the sake of clarity: heroism isn’t a get-out-of-jail card. If Assange did what he’s accused of, then he should pay the price for it in the same way anyone else should. Just because he’s doing things you think are important to the world doesn’t make him any less flawed or human than the rest of us. So stop assuming his innocence – if you think about it, to do so is completely contrary to the philosophy of Wikileaks itself.