If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.
If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)
I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest"
Many of these orgs laying off thousands have fallen into the depths of a moral maze -- where rational thinking is just impossible and all that's left is self-preservation.
I had a manager namecheck the layoffs as a reason they don't need to move on addressing any of our team's concerns about working conditions. Same manager invoked the Nuremburg Defense the other day. Trying times.
The US in particular is occupied by many competing powers. No one group has sweeping control of anything; most everyone is held in a deathgrip by interests to either side of their desired positions.
From city councils to the oval office, a lot of leaders have a short list of who's approval they need and can't get to do anything at all.
Federalism invites this type of incongruity. The silver lining is that it's a game that keeps a certain type of person preoccupied so as not to pursue worse ways of exploiting the rest of us.
> I doubt there is a single (professional) engineer that would say something like that.
I suspect an engineering professor would be even more compelled to highlight how social consensus is the foundation of everything else that follows. You only have to read the surface layers of this or that performance debate to see how it is unfortunately the case. "Performance" is a fluid term that doesn't mean much of anything on its own -- and people arguing that they've juiced another drop of performance juice from this or that application's fruit are often just talking past each other in terms of priorities or perspective.
The symbolic manipulation at the heart of mathematics is a byproduct of language -- another system beholden to social consensus. It's inescapable.
The more your work is in creative output, the more likely you are to be working 100% of the time you're on the clock. Cognition is complex and most of it happens under the covers. Once you wake up, you load up your brains with concerns and don't stop thinking about it just because you aren't in meetings or actively coding. Your conscious thoughts are only one layer in a dense system.
Arguably, you can't turn it off when you clock out either. It's why I argue for a retainer model on intellectual workers.
> I'm 100% not smart enough to get it right unless something stops me getting it wrong
IMO, type systems are harsher on modeling mistakes than something like Python is. Sure, you'll get it wrong the first time (sorry Grandma!). And in Python, you can mutate your system rapidly into a new state that can accommodate the old model's mistaken assumption. If your program starts getting complex enough that the mutation speed is dropping -- deconstruct it into smaller, manageable problems.
Humans are 100% not smart enough to build systems the way a lot of corporate shops keep trying to.
* No sick leave & limited vacation
* Inconsistent and insufficient planning paired with unrealistic expecations