"If your customers are too happy, you're leaving money on the table": it's the rallying cry of the enshittifier, and it's also what a friend of mine was told by a respected professor in a top-tier MBA program.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twi…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Enshittification is the theory that if platforms can shift value away from workers, suppliers, users and/or customers without facing consequences, we should expect that they will. A company is a colony organism made up of many differing organelles, some of whom have firm moral centers and good values, but those faction can't win an argument about enshittifying the company's offerings merely by gesturing towards their ethical reservations.
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Cory Doctorow
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To win that argument, the good guys have to be able to appeal to a villain's highest priority: their own self-interest. It's one thing to say, "I'll feel gross if we wreck our product this way," but it's another altogether to say, "We'll go broke - because of fines, or employee defections, or competitor poaching, or interoperable blocking tech - if we do it your way":
pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/mic…
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Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Someone in the org is always ready to believe that the customers (or workers, or suppliers) are too happy, and that this represents money left on the table. Customer service can be scaled back, wages cut, free features turned into upsells. Some of capitalism's most imaginative inventors are enshittifiers, dreaming up new ways to sell you to yourself.
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Cory Doctorow
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The great tragedy of all this is that the more useful and important a service becomes to you, the more the service's proprietors can extract from you. They don't care if you hate *them*, so long as you love the data, the friends, the productivity, the utility you get from the service more.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Writing in *Ethics and Information Technology*, Louisiana State's Michael J Ardoline and Muhlenberg College's Edward Lenzo write about another one of enshittification's systematic torments: "The cognitive and moral harms of platform decay":
link.springer.com/article/10.1…
The authors observe that our technologies quickly turn into cognitive prostheses: as soon as we can externalize some function of our thinking into a technology, we do.
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The cognitive and moral harms of platform decay - Ethics and Information Technology
SpringerLinkCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head, now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine! Sure, remembering those phone numbers wasn't cognitively useless. I cultivated all kinds of clever mnemonics based on the spatial relationships of the phone buttons, their alphabetical equivalents, the tones they made, and the arithmetic relationships between sequential digits, all of which constituted a kind of cognitive workout.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But after the Great Telephone Number Forgettering, I retasked all that cognitive capacity to memorizing and thinking about stuff that's much less arbitrary and far more consequential than phone numbers.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there's always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get from replacing our fallible and scarce meat-thinkers with something reproducible and external.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
No one is immune to this: Socrates thought that reading would make us all stupid because we'd lose the discipline of memorizing all works of literature (ironically, we only know that Socrates thought this because Plato wrote it down):
wondermark.com/socrates-vs-wri…
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True Stuff: Socrates vs. the Written Word
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it's the same thing as arithmetic). Now I keep hearing about millennials who can't read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.
So I *love* cognitive prostheses. As a perennially disoriented man with innately poor spatial reasoning and consequently no ability to parse a map, I *fucking love* living in the age of turn-by-turn GPS directions.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you wanna know how I write 2-3 books per year, blame the cognitive prosthesis of blogging, which forces me to apply rigor to the notes I take, and rewards me with a searchable database of everything I've ever found important, while stimulating a constant mnemonic rejuggling of all those thoughts that crystallizes into an endless stream of novel synthetic insights *and* road-tested ways to express them:
pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the…
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The Memex Method – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My blogging is self-hosted, and for good reason. An asset that important to my personal and professional life is too precious to entrust to any kind of third party service, *especially* in light of the collapse of discipline that prevents firms from enshittifying. Remember, the enshittifier's motto is "If your customer is too happy, you're leaving money on the table."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My digital, networked online notebook makes me *very* happy indeed, which means that if it were under the control of an enshittotropic colony organism like Google or Apple or Microsoft or Meta, it would only be a matter of time until some dominant faction decided to see how much they could extract from me by holding it to ransom or making it worse.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's not practical for everyone to self-host everything. I'm blessed with a lot of technical knowledge and the incredible talents and generosity of a brilliant sysadmin, the wonderful Ken Snider, who makes it all go for me. I've known Ken for 20+ years and the man is no enshittifier.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But most of us don't have a Ken in our lives, and even fewer of us *are* Ken, and so perforce, most of us end up externalizing large parts of our brains to networked services run by companies that would enshittify you without a second thought.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Trusting these companies with so much of your life can be catastrophic, because they are manifestly *too big to care*, which is why you can't get a customer service rep to save your life (and why they're turning over their vestigial customer service functions to chatbots, AKA "the Idgaf Gambit").
Take the case of "Mike," a software developer whose infant son developed a UTI during the covid lockdowns.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
On advice from his pediatrician, Mike took a picture of his son's infected penis with his Android phone and sent it to the doctor using a secure telemedicine app, forgetting that his Android device would also automatically sync all his photos to Google's cloud. Google automatically scans all these photos, and it flagged this one as child sexual abuse material (AKA "child pornography"), which resulted in the termination of *all* of Mike's Google services.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In an instant, Mike lost every family photo he'd taken since his son's birth, every saved email, all of his business and tax records in his Google Drive, his phone number (he was a Google Fi subscriber), his authenticator app, and his email address itself. Google handed his search history and many other sensitive records they held on him to the San Francisco Police Department, who concluded that everything was fine.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But the cops couldn't tell Mike any of this because he had no phone and no email, and, lacking these, could not recover *any* of his online accounts. Eventually, an SFPD detective had to ring Mike's doorbell to tell him he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Despite this, Mike *never* got his accounts or data back:
locusmag.com/2024/07/cory-doct…
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Cory Doctorow: Unpersoned
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is an *accidental* lobotimization of your outboard brain - it's what happens when a company that's too big to care drops one of its procedures on your head and crushes it like a grape. But there is an important sense in which these companies *do* care: they care whether you hate them more than you value the data and connections and utility they control. They care about this because if you're too happy, they're leaving money on the table.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's where Ardoline and Lenzo's work comes in. They both document the ways in which we turn these online services into cognitive prostheses, and then investigate how the enshittification of these services ends up making us stupider, by taking away the stuff that helps us think. They're drawing a line between platform decay and cognitive decay.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The authors look at examples like the enshittification of Google Search, a product that Google has deliberately and irretrievably enshittified:
pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/nam…
The web is a giant cognitive prosthesis, and early web tools put a lot of emphasis on things like bookmark management and local caching, so that the knowledge and cognition you externalized to the web were under your control.
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Pluralistic: The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (24 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But Google Search was so goddamned magic - before they cynically destroyed it - that a lot of us switched from "not remembering things because you have a bookmark that takes you to a website that remembers it for you" to "not remembering things and not remembering where to find them, and just typing queries into Google." The collapse of Google into a giant pile of shit is like giving every web user a traumatic brain injury.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's a good paper, but I think the situation is actually more dire than the paper makes it out to be, thanks to the AI bubble -
Wait! I'm not actually going to talk about what AI can do (which is a combination of a small set of boring useful things, a bunch of novelties, and a long list of things that AI can't do but is being used to do anyway). I'm talking about the financial fraud that AI serves.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Tech companies *must* be perceived as growing, because when a company is growing, it is valued *far* more highly than a company is once it has "matured." This is called the "price to earnings ratio" - the number of dollars investors are willing to pay for the company compared to the number of dollars a company is bringing in. So long as a company is growing, the PE ratio is very high, and this helps the company to *actually* grow.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's because the shares in growing companies are highly liquid, and can be traded for equity in other companies and/or the labor of key employees, meaning that growth companies can almost always outbid their mature counterparts when it comes to expanding through acquisition and hiring. That means that while a company is growing, its PE ratio can help it *keep* growing.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But here's the corollary: when a growth company *stops* growing, its shares are suddenly and violently revalued as though they were shares in a mature company, which tanks the personal net worth of the company's top managers and key employees (whose portfolios are stuffed with their employer's now-plummeting stock).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Worse: in order to retain those employees and hire more (or to acquire key companies), the no-longer-growing company has to pay with cash, which is *much* harder to get than its own shares. Even worse: they have to bid against *growing* companies.
A growth company is like an airplane that has two modes: climbing and nose-diving, and while it's easy to go from climbing to crashing, it's *much* harder to go the other way.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Ironically, the moment at which a company's growth is most likely to stall is right after its greatest triumph: after a company conquers its market, it has nowhere else to go. Google's got a 90% Search market-share - how can it possibly grow Search?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It can't (just like Meta can't really grow social, and Microsoft can't grow office suites, etc), so it has to convince Wall Street that it has a shot at conquering some *other* market that the street perceives as unimaginably vast and thus capable of keeping the growth engine going. Tech has pulled a lot of sweaty tricks to create this impression, inflating bubbles like "pivot to video" and "metaverse" and "cryptocurrency," and now it's AI.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The problem is that AI just isn't very popular. People go out of their way to avoid AI products:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
For an AI-driven growth story to work, tech companies have to produce a stream of charts depicting lines that go up and to the right, reflecting some carefully chosen set of metrics demonstrating AI's increasing popularity.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
One way to produce these increasing trend-lines on demand is to replace all the most commonly used parts of a service that you love and rely on with buttons that summon an AI. This is the "fatfinger AI economy," a set of trendlines produced by bombarding people who graze their screens with a stray fingertip with a bunch of AI bullshit, so you can claim that your users are "engaging" with AI:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpi…
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Pluralistic: AI and the fatfinger economy (02 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's a form of "twiddling" - changing how a service works on a per-user, per-interaction basis in order to shift value from the user to the company:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twi…
Twiddling represents *the* big cognitive hazard from enshittification during the AI bubble: the parts of your UI that matter most to you are the parts that you use as vital cognitive prostheses.
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Twiddler – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A product team whose KPI is "get users to tap on an AI button" is going to use the fine-grained data they have on your technological activities to preferentially target these UI elements that you rely on with AI boobytraps. You are too happy, so they are leaving money on the table, and they're coming for it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is a form of "attention rent": the companies are taxing your muscle-memory, forcing you to produce deceptive usage statistics at the price of either diverting your cognition from completing a task to hunt around for the button that banishes the AI and lets you get back to what you were doing; or to simply abandon that cognitive prosthesis:
pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/sub…
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Pluralistic: Big Tech’s “attention rents” (03 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's *true* "engagement-hacking": not performing acts of dopamine manipulation; but rather, spying on your habitual usage of a digital tool in order to swap buttons around in order to get you to make a number go up. It's exploiting the fact that you engage with something useful and good to make it less useful and worse, because if you're too happy, some enshittifier is leaving money on the table.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
kickstarter.com/projects/docto…
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Cory Doctorow
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Image:
Stephen Drake (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
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File:Analog Test Array modular synth by sduck409.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgMichael Roberts
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You know, this has bugged me about the Share-to-FB button on my phone for probably two years now. Stories, of course, are *stupid*, and I only want to post photos to News, which is my actual, you know, friends. But when I go to do the post, the *menu items move around* from week to week, in the hope of tricking me into posting a Story instead.
(That whole pivot-to-TikTok was so sad. And they still so very want it to happen.)
Molly White
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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samiamsam
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Simon Brooke
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You know, a lot of what one learns at university level is not knowledge itself -- because in any complex field there is too much for a person to remember -- but meta-knowledge: knowledge of how to find knowledge. How to use the university library catalogue, for example. How to follow a standard reference.
Every time we change the structure of the university library catalogue, we put a cognitive load on every user of it.
>>>
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Simon Brooke
in reply to Simon Brooke • • •Sensitive content
There's huge utility for the whole of society for meta-knowledge to be stable, because changes to it create, at a social level, so much collective cognitive load. The utility of the new schema has to be vastly better than of the old schema to have utility.
Of course, web search engines -- for me Lycos, then AltaVista, then Google -- did initially provide vastly better ways to access knowledge. But they've had no positive innovation now for thirty years.
Ewen Bell 📸
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Read a few comments in appreciation of the "Ken" in our lives. Just taking a moment to realise that in our house, I am Ken!
On one level I know these skills are valuable. On another level I forget that value and it's nice to be reminded. My wife and I run two separate businesses from home, both in the creative space. I'm the web guy. The tech guy. The computer guy. The solutions guy. Being self employed demands many skills, and just the basics of setting up your website and keeping that safe is a major foundation for any business.
These days we also have deal with hackers releasing scripts all over the web, ransomware that targets your NAS server, and a raft of identity theft threats that our govts seem unable or unwilling to deal with. It's not easy out here on the frontline, and AI slop being thrown at every corner of the internet is not helping.
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
MidniteMikeWrites
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is impressive. I got into blogging this year for a similar reason and have written (to my astonishment) 20k+ words, but can't yet imagine going deeper and expanding my output.
Even if blogging or writing in general lets us cognitively offload, being able to more deeply shape and massage ideas in the way you do is a highly active process. The ability to write multiple books per year probably comes down to something more fundamental than just blogging.
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Merc
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •There is one minor issue with millennials (and younger) being unable to read an analog clock: The "clock drawing test" is a super useful tool in cognitive testing.
It can help diagnose Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Diffuse Lewy Body, schizophrenia...
It tests coordination / muscle control, planning, correctly following instructions, memory, "perseveration", etc.
I wonder if there is an equivalent very common, very standardized, complex but not too complex device that can take the place of the clock.
Paweł Ausir Dembowski
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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SpaceLifeForm
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Jargoggles
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Moz
in reply to Jargoggles • • •Paul Cantrell
in reply to Jargoggles • • •“Respected by whom” is always the question in such situations
@pluralistic
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Nick Lockwood
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Paul Cantrell reshared this.
Todd Knarr
in reply to Jargoggles • • •Bjørn Stærk
in reply to Todd Knarr • • •one truism about sales i picked up long ago is that you should _never_ go for 100%. don't extract the maximum you can get. that's a bad deal that looks like a good one.
@jargoggles @pluralistic
Shannon Clark
in reply to Todd Knarr • • •@tknarr @jargoggles or even over a shorter timeframe. Happy customers return. And not only do they return they send others to you (often spending far more money in both cases). And unhappy customers actively tell others to avoid your company.
This is as true of restaurants as it is of enterprise software venders.
(I observed a meeting of the CTOs and senior tech staff of a bunch of law firms once - they freely shared bad vendors amongst themselves as firms to avoid)
Msb
in reply to Shannon Clark • • •This is why vulture capital firms will pay ridiculous sums to acquire all the vendors in a particular market segment. I worked in a municipal government and watched dozens of small vendors that we used get acquired and when we looked at the other available solutions find that they too had already been acquired so we were pushed into crappier solutions as they tried to aggregate with crappy support and more expensive licensing and support fees.
Todd Knarr
in reply to Todd Knarr • • •guust
in reply to Todd Knarr • • •iantra
in reply to guust • • •Todd Knarr
in reply to iantra • • •@iantra @guust @jargoggles Nuance, maybe. But the size of the differences seems to indicate that it's a rare case where maximizing short-term gains is the better option. Which matches both common sense and actual results for a wise range of situations.
Yeast growth maximizes short-term gains too, and we know where that ends.
Brad Rosenheim
in reply to Jargoggles • • •As a professor, I will say that "top tier MBA program" is almost an oxymoron as business programs seem to be the dregs of both teaching and learning at major universities in the U.S.A.
@pluralistic
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GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Brad Rosenheim • • •Obviously, the university exemplifies exactly what he’s talking about right?
Economics is another dreadful field. I’d love to see the departments absolutely pilloried.
The particular the economics department because so much of mainstream theory is garbage. Mathematical crap and literally mathematical crap. And more than a few things that are contradicted by empirical evidence.
Brad Rosenheim
in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell • • •@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Economic theory is predicated on the notion that every consumer is a rational actor. Yet markets are entirely made up of emotion. I rest your case.
@jargoggles @pluralistic
GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Brad Rosenheim • • •Oh, I know I’m quite well read on the detractors of mainstream theory and I can handle the math, along with having a background in anthropology, some understanding of psychology and a few other things along with an engineering background.
Everything is a wasteland
(Edit Apple voice to text as ass)
mtconleyuk
in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell • • •My Roman History professor used to start most classes with a reading from the latest missive from the uni’s College of Education, which was always good for a laugh. He was pretty spot on.
Cavyherd
in reply to GhostOnTheHalfShell • • •An acquaintance did an economics degree some years ago; graduated top of his class, was tasked with speaking at commencement. Don't know how he resolved his "economics is basically runes & astrology" conclusion with the presumed requirement to be "uplifting."
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clew
in reply to Cavyherd • • •“Runes and astrology, so, amazing opportunities to profit!” ?
@cavyherd @GhostOnTheHalfShell @Brad_Rosenheim @jargoggles @pluralistic
roboticus lastius (not a bot)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Urzl
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Nick
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •