Well, you can win any argument if you get to redefine the words other people are using. I made it clear what my definitions were, so at best you're just making an unrelated point.
As for the reasonable person standard, it is a long-established legal concept in the United States which you clearly don't understand -- or have again redefined to make your job easier.
I am cool with anyone making a private safe space, so long as they don't try to extend the rules of their private space to public safe spaces. Both have legitimate functions but mixing them up is bad.
As for hate, that's a moot point. Some people are natural haters. I draw the line at intimidation -- things a reasonable person would find threatening. If someone can maintain a hateful opinion under conditions that subject that allow others to subject that opinion to critical scrutiny, then they are unlikely to ever change their mind. However they are also likely to find such conditions intolerable.
The original medieval concept of a liberal arts education was that it prepared you intellectually to perform the duties of a gentleman. This is why mathematics played a major part in the liberal arts. First you mastered grammar, logic and rhetoric, then you tackled the mathematical disciplines: astronomy, music (theory of harmonics mainly so that counts as another dose of math), arithmetic (Books V - X of Euclid) and geometry (Books I - IV, XI - XIII).
Only after you'd mastered all that material were you considered prepared to go onto specialized advanced studies (sadly, your choices were limited pretty much to theology, law or medicine).
Now from my geekish perspective this medieval curriculum looks a hell of a lot more rigorous than anything any modern American university offers. I'd update the math curriculum, add some basic courses in physical and social sciences and finance and you'd be graduating people fully prepared to be kick-ass citizens.
But universities act more like vocational schools. Even if you major in art history, they train you as if that's going to be be your job. And employers treat universities not as educational institutions, but as certifiers of social class.
It's no wonder that universities don't improve critical thinking skills. You're supposed to pick them up by osmosis.
You know, critical thinking really starts with clarity about what you're talking about. This kind of emotional argument about "safe spaces" is a perfect example of how not to go about it.
"Safe space" refers to two very different concepts. The first sense is inclusive: it's about minority or disparaged groups being free from intimidation or threats of violence in a community. The second sense is exclusive: "Safe space" can also refer to clubs and societies reserved for minorities to discuss their particular concerns.
I find neither sense of "safe space" to be objectionable. The first is just an explicit extension of the normal protections of academic freedom to the LGBT community. The second is something which doesn't particularly concern me one way or the other.
Where there is trouble is mixing the two concepts up. And to be fair, it's not just the right who does this. The fuzzy thinkers on the left do too. In an inclusive environment, you have to be prepared to face opinions that offend you or make you uncomfortable: that's why there needs to be a prohibition on intimidation. People don't threaten people whom they find unthreatening.
The standard argument against the possibility of hacking an American is that it's impossible given the decentralized nature of American elections. But the people making this argument aren't hackers, and they don't understand how hackers think. They seem to believe that a hacker would try to brute force hack every election district in America.
If *you* were going to try to hack the US elections, would you do it that way?
I know what I'd do: I'd probe the system looking for vulnerable installations in swing states where the vote was going to be close. And I'd be pretty confident of finding them, given enough time, because of the decentralized nature of American elections. The average person is totally shit at information security, and half of all people are below average.
What this document reveals is that the Russians were doing exactly what I would have done: they were probing for vulnerabilities. Evidently the NSA at the time of drafting had found no evidence of success. Given that the probing was taking place days before the election (so far as we know), it's quite possible that the Russians were too late. On the other hand, it's not exactly trivial to detect the operations of a hacker who possesses "national means", even if you possess national means of your own.
You can call it "insane" or "drama" if you like, but that's an appeal to the stone argument. The objective assessment of this news is that while the sky has not definitively fallen, something very serious has taken place.
People here have been claiming the document fake as late as this morning. Charging the leaker in this case effectively verifies the document's authenticity.
This is one of the reason leakers are so seldom prosecuted. Going after them does more political damage than the leak itself. In attempting to protect itself from unflattering revelations, the administration has endorsed a document that, for the first time, raises a serious question about its legitimacy.
Stupid? Man. He got Donald Trump elected for president. FUCKING DONALD TRUMP. He outsmarted everyone
Interesting you should mention that. I just finish Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jersusalem, about the trial of the notorious SS officer. It turns out that many Nazis made exactly the argument you make here. They believed Hitler had to have been a genius because he started out as an army corporal and ended up Chancellor. But if you look at what Hitler did after he become chancellor you can only conclude that he was a fool. He made blunder after blunder, ending in total ruin for the country and suicide for himself.
How do you reconcile the fact he was a fool with his success as a politician? Well, like anyone who reaches the top spot, he had a few lucky breaks. In the economic chaos of a worldwide depression, a lot of voters were looking for someone to shake things up. Even so he wasn't really in a position to win the chancellorship, in fact support for the Nazis was declining. But business interests, convinced Hitler was just a populist clown, convinced President Hindenburg that Hitler would be a useful tool. That was a huge mistake. They underestimated, not his brilliance, but his ruthless disregard for legal constraint.
So political success is no guarantee a man is not a fool. History has shown that repeatedly.
Well, this is just a corollary of Amazon's all-things-to-all-people strategy. If anybody buys anything, Amazon wants it to be through them.
Even people on welfare have to buy stuff. And most people who are on welfare are off welfare in under three years and back in the workforce. So in a sense this is like the prime membership they gave my college student daughter, who is poor as a church mouse and has to live like a monk. But when she graduates she'll have a lot more money to spend, and she'll have been trained to find Amazon the most convenient way to buy things.
Even I find myself buying things through Amazon for convenience. I should buy electronics shit through Digikey but sometimes if I'm ordering something else on prime I'll throw in something I need for my current project.
The analogy I like to use is the medieval baron who sets up his castle at a critical river crossing or mountain pass and "taxes" trade passing through.
The revenue generated wasn't from creating anything. Nor was it from developing efficient modes of distribution -- far from it. It was by using power to seize a strategic position and exploit that position. Economically they were effectively bandits sanctioned by tradition.
That is why the emergence of capitalism could only happen after the emergence of the modern nation-state. Until a central authority restricted the power of individuals, it would always be more profitable to limit the access of producers to consumers than it would be to create value.
In other words anarchy does not maximize human freedom. Not in practical terms.
I ran a software team for years where 1/4 of my developers were women. But originally the team leader reported to me; my role was supposed to be more big picture stuff. The problem was the team was delivering total crap, and when I looked into it I discovered that the lead developer, while technically knowledgeable, was a narcissistic bully.
The reason the team wasn't performing was that the lead developer was dumping all kinds of stupid interpersonal bullshit on everyone. The form that it happened to take with the women was sexist condescension. So I demoted him -- in retrospect I should have fired him -- and took over the team myself. Immediately the problems went away, not because I'm a brilliant leader, but because the people on the team were good and I wasn't an asshole -- or at least I didn't act like one. Not acting like an asshole is half the battle when you're boss.
Sexism and bigotry have a way of becoming facets of any bad situation. When things are going well they're just meaningless bits of attitude that people keep to themselves. But when the shit hits the fan those attitudes mean there's a lot more shit getting flung around.
The answer to sexism in the workplace isn't to cure sexism in the world; it's to cut out the stupid workplace drama. But when things are going bad, you have to come down hard on that bullshit. When you're trying to set things right you can't have any tolerance for anything that undermines what you're trying to do.
Women developers aren't particularly hard to retain if you maintain an atmosphere of professionalism in your workplace. They want the same thing other developers want: interesting assignments, and a chance to advance their technical skills. Give any developer those things and he'll be reluctant to leave.
I'm old enough to remember Watergate, and that started pretty thin too. Here's the thing about people: they really suck at keeping secrets, especially when the pressure is on. That's how this works. The opposition gets out ahead of the evidence, but eventually -- if there's something to the story -- someone will crack. Then slowly, slowly the president's supporters will edge away, until he's left with nothing but a handful of useless, deluded stalwarts.
Now I've also seen a lot of bullshit "scandals" over my lifetime. That's because, like I said, the partisan opponents get ahead of what can be definitively proved. But that serves a purpose. If you really have faith in the President, you have nothing to worry about. You can't take down a president with nothing but hatred, you need to get something that sticks; something with legs to do real damage.
The problem is that results like 2016 don't have any single cause. There are many things that had they been different could have changed the outcome.
Blame isn't like a hot potato: there's plenty for everyone. Clinton has her share of the blame. Her weak and passive messaging, and her over-reliance on dubious analytics in the face of clear field intelligence were both mistakes. Absent either of them and she would have won -- it was only a matter of swinging 100,000 strategically placed votes, about 1/100th of 1% of the votes cast.
This doesn't mean other things didn't cause her loss too, but the bottom line was that she was facing Donald Trump, a boorish reality TV clown and easily the stupidest and most ignorant man ever to win the presidency. She should have blown the doors of the election far beyond the reach of a few unlucky breaks or marginal meddling to matter.
If you look at the actual public evidence, that's all we've got.
Exactly. The document in question takes a quite conclusive tone on the matter, but does not divulge any raw intelligence data or the methods used to assess that data.
Now, either the NSA personnel who produced this document are a hell of lot less smart than you are, or the document is a fake, or there is private information that the rest of us don't have.
The original Milgram experiment trial found about 2/3 of the subjects to be compliant, so even under those conditions resistance to authority is not so rare.
The experiment had some flaws, as groundbreaking research frequently does. For one thing there was no attempt to ascertain after the fact whether students were in fact fooled by the experimental setup. There are also serious questions about Milgram's handling of the data. Some of contended the Milgram's compliance figures are some 15% higher than they should have been.
Milgram's compliance rates are slightly the high side compared to most attempts to recreate the experiment. At least one attempt produced a 28% compliance rate, less than half of what Milgram reported. While that's statistically much different from what most researcher get, given that the major confounding factor in the experiment tends to increase compliance, it may be a credible result. One of the most interesting versions of the experiment used a real victim -- a puppy -- although the puppy was not subjected to lethal shocks. Here a sex difference emerged: about half the male participants declined to to continue to highest setting, but all the female participants did.
My point is that it doesn't matter what a conformist thinks. What matters is what you can get him to do.
I would argue that the habit of obedience is a worse character flaw than bigotry. A bigot may act on his peculiar irrational passions, but a lapdog can be made to do anything.
Hannah Arendt wrote a famous book about Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who organized the "evacuations" of Jews to the death camps. Eichmann in his trial claimed harbor no ill feelings toward Jews, and to have been horrified by what was happening in the death camps. This sounds like an incredibly weak and self-serving excuse, but looking at Eichmann's biography Arendt came to a startling conclusion: he was telling the truth.
Knowing better didn't excuse was Eichmann did. It made him worse than people who were so twisted that they didn't realize what they were doing was wrong. It wasn't the rare human monsters who made the scale of the Holocaust possible, it was the commonplace, weak-minded people like Eichmann.
I think the red flag here isn't bigotry, it's hazing. Prove you're extreme enough to join our in-group, then pressure others to do the same.
Toxic conformity produces all the ills bigotry does and then some, but with none of the sincerity. It's doing what you're told simply because you were told.
Bigotry, where it isn't tied to some kind of psychopathy, is mainly a matter of ignorance. You can educate people out of it. But the hazing mentality is refractory and self-perpetuating. The recent Penn hazing case shows that academically smart kids who are prone to act like irresponsible conformist idiots can't be fixed by anti-hazing policies and educational programs. They just have to grow out of it. Some people never do.
People who are susceptible to this kind of social pressure might even need a controlled form of supervised hazing, like boot camp.
They aren't brain surgery. They aren't even primary care. All that model disruption business is about sweeping away old, inefficient systems that support simple and relatively discrete transactions: systems that sell me a book; give me a ride from A to B; or provide someone to mow my lawn for me. The entrepreneur in these scenarios focuses on achieving speed, scale and convenience rather than managing complex, ongoing and labor-intensive processes.
Healthcare services may be inefficient and mind-numbingly bureaucratic, but people are going to be intensely skeptical of anything that aims to shut down their local hospital or physical therapy clinic. The one core function that certainly could be constructively disrupted using the standard Silicon Valley model is prescriptions: drugs and medical devices. Those areas are fiercely defended by their respective industries, who have maximizing consumer expenditure down to a science.
The one success story in the article doesn't really fit the classic Silicon Valley creative destruction narrative. It amounts to what is called in other parts of the country "concierge medicine", but with some added high-tech frippery to appeal to well-heeled Bay Area clients. There are lots of gaps in the US health care coverage, but unfortunately they mostly center around under-serviced poor and rural populations. Lower cost services would be welcome in those segments, even if substandard.
Jobs uniquely understood how important choosing things not to do was. Engineers and designers do brilliant work every day, but the vast majority of that achievement gets lost in the clutter and quickly forgotten.
Better to leave consumers wanting more than to leave them confused. Best of all, you can sell them that something more next year. That way you don't have to hit it out of the park every single time. It's more like loading the bases and then getting to first, time and time again.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you can win any argument if you get to redefine the words other people are using. I made it clear what my definitions were, so at best you're just making an unrelated point.
As for the reasonable person standard, it is a long-established legal concept in the United States which you clearly don't understand -- or have again redefined to make your job easier.
I am cool with anyone making a private safe space, so long as they don't try to extend the rules of their private space to public safe spaces. Both have legitimate functions but mixing them up is bad.
As for hate, that's a moot point. Some people are natural haters. I draw the line at intimidation -- things a reasonable person would find threatening. If someone can maintain a hateful opinion under conditions that subject that allow others to subject that opinion to critical scrutiny, then they are unlikely to ever change their mind. However they are also likely to find such conditions intolerable.
The original medieval concept of a liberal arts education was that it prepared you intellectually to perform the duties of a gentleman. This is why mathematics played a major part in the liberal arts. First you mastered grammar, logic and rhetoric, then you tackled the mathematical disciplines: astronomy, music (theory of harmonics mainly so that counts as another dose of math), arithmetic (Books V - X of Euclid) and geometry (Books I - IV, XI - XIII).
Only after you'd mastered all that material were you considered prepared to go onto specialized advanced studies (sadly, your choices were limited pretty much to theology, law or medicine).
Now from my geekish perspective this medieval curriculum looks a hell of a lot more rigorous than anything any modern American university offers. I'd update the math curriculum, add some basic courses in physical and social sciences and finance and you'd be graduating people fully prepared to be kick-ass citizens.
But universities act more like vocational schools. Even if you major in art history, they train you as if that's going to be be your job. And employers treat universities not as educational institutions, but as certifiers of social class.
It's no wonder that universities don't improve critical thinking skills. You're supposed to pick them up by osmosis.
You know, critical thinking really starts with clarity about what you're talking about. This kind of emotional argument about "safe spaces" is a perfect example of how not to go about it.
"Safe space" refers to two very different concepts. The first sense is inclusive: it's about minority or disparaged groups being free from intimidation or threats of violence in a community. The second sense is exclusive: "Safe space" can also refer to clubs and societies reserved for minorities to discuss their particular concerns.
I find neither sense of "safe space" to be objectionable. The first is just an explicit extension of the normal protections of academic freedom to the LGBT community. The second is something which doesn't particularly concern me one way or the other.
Where there is trouble is mixing the two concepts up. And to be fair, it's not just the right who does this. The fuzzy thinkers on the left do too. In an inclusive environment, you have to be prepared to face opinions that offend you or make you uncomfortable: that's why there needs to be a prohibition on intimidation. People don't threaten people whom they find unthreatening.
The standard argument against the possibility of hacking an American is that it's impossible given the decentralized nature of American elections. But the people making this argument aren't hackers, and they don't understand how hackers think. They seem to believe that a hacker would try to brute force hack every election district in America.
If *you* were going to try to hack the US elections, would you do it that way?
I know what I'd do: I'd probe the system looking for vulnerable installations in swing states where the vote was going to be close. And I'd be pretty confident of finding them, given enough time, because of the decentralized nature of American elections. The average person is totally shit at information security, and half of all people are below average.
What this document reveals is that the Russians were doing exactly what I would have done: they were probing for vulnerabilities. Evidently the NSA at the time of drafting had found no evidence of success. Given that the probing was taking place days before the election (so far as we know), it's quite possible that the Russians were too late. On the other hand, it's not exactly trivial to detect the operations of a hacker who possesses "national means", even if you possess national means of your own.
You can call it "insane" or "drama" if you like, but that's an appeal to the stone argument. The objective assessment of this news is that while the sky has not definitively fallen, something very serious has taken place.
People here have been claiming the document fake as late as this morning. Charging the leaker in this case effectively verifies the document's authenticity.
This is one of the reason leakers are so seldom prosecuted. Going after them does more political damage than the leak itself. In attempting to protect itself from unflattering revelations, the administration has endorsed a document that, for the first time, raises a serious question about its legitimacy.
Stupid? Man. He got Donald Trump elected for president. FUCKING DONALD TRUMP. He outsmarted everyone
Interesting you should mention that. I just finish Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jersusalem, about the trial of the notorious SS officer. It turns out that many Nazis made exactly the argument you make here. They believed Hitler had to have been a genius because he started out as an army corporal and ended up Chancellor. But if you look at what Hitler did after he become chancellor you can only conclude that he was a fool. He made blunder after blunder, ending in total ruin for the country and suicide for himself.
How do you reconcile the fact he was a fool with his success as a politician? Well, like anyone who reaches the top spot, he had a few lucky breaks. In the economic chaos of a worldwide depression, a lot of voters were looking for someone to shake things up. Even so he wasn't really in a position to win the chancellorship, in fact support for the Nazis was declining. But business interests, convinced Hitler was just a populist clown, convinced President Hindenburg that Hitler would be a useful tool. That was a huge mistake. They underestimated, not his brilliance, but his ruthless disregard for legal constraint.
So political success is no guarantee a man is not a fool. History has shown that repeatedly.
Well, this is just a corollary of Amazon's all-things-to-all-people strategy. If anybody buys anything, Amazon wants it to be through them.
Even people on welfare have to buy stuff. And most people who are on welfare are off welfare in under three years and back in the workforce. So in a sense this is like the prime membership they gave my college student daughter, who is poor as a church mouse and has to live like a monk. But when she graduates she'll have a lot more money to spend, and she'll have been trained to find Amazon the most convenient way to buy things.
Even I find myself buying things through Amazon for convenience. I should buy electronics shit through Digikey but sometimes if I'm ordering something else on prime I'll throw in something I need for my current project.
In some alternate version of reality, sure.
We do not have shit yet.
As to whether we will eventually have shit, like I said, time will tell.
The analogy I like to use is the medieval baron who sets up his castle at a critical river crossing or mountain pass and "taxes" trade passing through.
The revenue generated wasn't from creating anything. Nor was it from developing efficient modes of distribution -- far from it. It was by using power to seize a strategic position and exploit that position. Economically they were effectively bandits sanctioned by tradition.
That is why the emergence of capitalism could only happen after the emergence of the modern nation-state. Until a central authority restricted the power of individuals, it would always be more profitable to limit the access of producers to consumers than it would be to create value.
In other words anarchy does not maximize human freedom. Not in practical terms.
Somewhat supportive anecdote here.
I ran a software team for years where 1/4 of my developers were women. But originally the team leader reported to me; my role was supposed to be more big picture stuff. The problem was the team was delivering total crap, and when I looked into it I discovered that the lead developer, while technically knowledgeable, was a narcissistic bully.
The reason the team wasn't performing was that the lead developer was dumping all kinds of stupid interpersonal bullshit on everyone. The form that it happened to take with the women was sexist condescension. So I demoted him -- in retrospect I should have fired him -- and took over the team myself. Immediately the problems went away, not because I'm a brilliant leader, but because the people on the team were good and I wasn't an asshole -- or at least I didn't act like one. Not acting like an asshole is half the battle when you're boss.
Sexism and bigotry have a way of becoming facets of any bad situation. When things are going well they're just meaningless bits of attitude that people keep to themselves. But when the shit hits the fan those attitudes mean there's a lot more shit getting flung around.
The answer to sexism in the workplace isn't to cure sexism in the world; it's to cut out the stupid workplace drama. But when things are going bad, you have to come down hard on that bullshit. When you're trying to set things right you can't have any tolerance for anything that undermines what you're trying to do.
Women developers aren't particularly hard to retain if you maintain an atmosphere of professionalism in your workplace. They want the same thing other developers want: interesting assignments, and a chance to advance their technical skills. Give any developer those things and he'll be reluctant to leave.
Three words to live by: time will tell.
I'm old enough to remember Watergate, and that started pretty thin too. Here's the thing about people: they really suck at keeping secrets, especially when the pressure is on. That's how this works. The opposition gets out ahead of the evidence, but eventually -- if there's something to the story -- someone will crack. Then slowly, slowly the president's supporters will edge away, until he's left with nothing but a handful of useless, deluded stalwarts.
Now I've also seen a lot of bullshit "scandals" over my lifetime. That's because, like I said, the partisan opponents get ahead of what can be definitively proved. But that serves a purpose. If you really have faith in the President, you have nothing to worry about. You can't take down a president with nothing but hatred, you need to get something that sticks; something with legs to do real damage.
You stole the words right from my mouth: 90/5067? That's significant at the p < 0.02 level!
The problem is that results like 2016 don't have any single cause. There are many things that had they been different could have changed the outcome.
Blame isn't like a hot potato: there's plenty for everyone. Clinton has her share of the blame. Her weak and passive messaging, and her over-reliance on dubious analytics in the face of clear field intelligence were both mistakes. Absent either of them and she would have won -- it was only a matter of swinging 100,000 strategically placed votes, about 1/100th of 1% of the votes cast.
This doesn't mean other things didn't cause her loss too, but the bottom line was that she was facing Donald Trump, a boorish reality TV clown and easily the stupidest and most ignorant man ever to win the presidency. She should have blown the doors of the election far beyond the reach of a few unlucky breaks or marginal meddling to matter.
I know you'd like to change the subject back to Hillary, but we're talking about the Russians here and their cozy relationship to the President.
If you look at the actual public evidence, that's all we've got.
Exactly. The document in question takes a quite conclusive tone on the matter, but does not divulge any raw intelligence data or the methods used to assess that data.
Now, either the NSA personnel who produced this document are a hell of lot less smart than you are, or the document is a fake, or there is private information that the rest of us don't have.
This continued media frenzy became tiresome some time ago. Can we move on to something new to be outraged about?
You seem to be conflating "important" and "entertaining".
Important stuff is often quite boring, at least at the outset before you understand what's going on.
The original Milgram experiment trial found about 2/3 of the subjects to be compliant, so even under those conditions resistance to authority is not so rare.
The experiment had some flaws, as groundbreaking research frequently does. For one thing there was no attempt to ascertain after the fact whether students were in fact fooled by the experimental setup. There are also serious questions about Milgram's handling of the data. Some of contended the Milgram's compliance figures are some 15% higher than they should have been.
Milgram's compliance rates are slightly the high side compared to most attempts to recreate the experiment. At least one attempt produced a 28% compliance rate, less than half of what Milgram reported. While that's statistically much different from what most researcher get, given that the major confounding factor in the experiment tends to increase compliance, it may be a credible result. One of the most interesting versions of the experiment used a real victim -- a puppy -- although the puppy was not subjected to lethal shocks. Here a sex difference emerged: about half the male participants declined to to continue to highest setting, but all the female participants did.
My point is that it doesn't matter what a conformist thinks. What matters is what you can get him to do.
I would argue that the habit of obedience is a worse character flaw than bigotry. A bigot may act on his peculiar irrational passions, but a lapdog can be made to do anything.
Hannah Arendt wrote a famous book about Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who organized the "evacuations" of Jews to the death camps. Eichmann in his trial claimed harbor no ill feelings toward Jews, and to have been horrified by what was happening in the death camps. This sounds like an incredibly weak and self-serving excuse, but looking at Eichmann's biography Arendt came to a startling conclusion: he was telling the truth.
Knowing better didn't excuse was Eichmann did. It made him worse than people who were so twisted that they didn't realize what they were doing was wrong. It wasn't the rare human monsters who made the scale of the Holocaust possible, it was the commonplace, weak-minded people like Eichmann.
"Obedience," Arendt wrote, "is support."
Until you provide numbers, I won't care about your alleged improvements.
Well, insofar that this is a leak of information about an unannounced product, it's not exactly nefarious that they haven't published any numbers.
I yield to nobody when it comes to contempt for Microsoft, but it's a point of pride to keep the things I'm contemptuous about reasonable.
I think the red flag here isn't bigotry, it's hazing. Prove you're extreme enough to join our in-group, then pressure others to do the same.
Toxic conformity produces all the ills bigotry does and then some, but with none of the sincerity. It's doing what you're told simply because you were told.
Bigotry, where it isn't tied to some kind of psychopathy, is mainly a matter of ignorance. You can educate people out of it. But the hazing mentality is refractory and self-perpetuating. The recent Penn hazing case shows that academically smart kids who are prone to act like irresponsible conformist idiots can't be fixed by anti-hazing policies and educational programs. They just have to grow out of it. Some people never do.
People who are susceptible to this kind of social pressure might even need a controlled form of supervised hazing, like boot camp.
They aren't brain surgery. They aren't even primary care. All that model disruption business is about sweeping away old, inefficient systems that support simple and relatively discrete transactions: systems that sell me a book; give me a ride from A to B; or provide someone to mow my lawn for me. The entrepreneur in these scenarios focuses on achieving speed, scale and convenience rather than managing complex, ongoing and labor-intensive processes.
Healthcare services may be inefficient and mind-numbingly bureaucratic, but people are going to be intensely skeptical of anything that aims to shut down their local hospital or physical therapy clinic. The one core function that certainly could be constructively disrupted using the standard Silicon Valley model is prescriptions: drugs and medical devices. Those areas are fiercely defended by their respective industries, who have maximizing consumer expenditure down to a science.
The one success story in the article doesn't really fit the classic Silicon Valley creative destruction narrative. It amounts to what is called in other parts of the country "concierge medicine", but with some added high-tech frippery to appeal to well-heeled Bay Area clients. There are lots of gaps in the US health care coverage, but unfortunately they mostly center around under-serviced poor and rural populations. Lower cost services would be welcome in those segments, even if substandard.
Jobs uniquely understood how important choosing things not to do was. Engineers and designers do brilliant work every day, but the vast majority of that achievement gets lost in the clutter and quickly forgotten.
Better to leave consumers wanting more than to leave them confused. Best of all, you can sell them that something more next year. That way you don't have to hit it out of the park every single time. It's more like loading the bases and then getting to first, time and time again.
No, he doesn't do DIY; he deals death wholesale.