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wart57 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

Popeye_Card wrote:There is a pretty universal truth, which I am reminded of this time of year because it is performance appraisal season. Lousy performers hate to be told that they are lousy. That's why they never improve. People with ambition? They appreciate being told where they can improve. Heck, they probably self-recognize their own faults. They can get upset when you don't have enough critical feedback for them. But people who stink? They are floored when you tell them they stink. It is always someone else's fault, or you aren't being fair to them.

I think that applies here. Stupid people hate to be told when they are stupid. Most smart people would be embarrassed to know they were duped by Russian trolls. But the majority of people who were dumb enough to fall for these pretty clearly fake groups to start with? They can't possibly be wrong. Someone ELSE is to blame here.

Alternate interpretation: it is easy to accept feedback in a context where you understand yourself to be valued. Negative feedback in an annual evaluation format where you rightly understand it to be a threat to your livelihood triggers defensiveness and fear, both of which damage relationships and degrade performance. As I understand the research on annual performance reviews, the evidence is that they are ineffective. Management occurs in the day to day and requires skill more challenging to apply than doling out threats and bonuses. The reviews remain, imo, because they are useful as a faux-meritocratic justification of the internal power structure and inequality. Those who have power must always explain it to themselves as deserved. You can see this from British writing about how their cultural superiority justifies their noble conquests of the lesser peoples to American CEOs celebrating themselves as great job creators to whom we must all genuflect. In both cases, a willingness to dismiss the needs of others and readiness crush them when it is personally advantageous is often more useful than merit even in the narrow ideological way it is typically defined.

In the case of Facebook nonsense, my first reaction is that it is super gross the way various powerful players from Fox News, to Republican politicians, to Russian manipulators are destroying people's minds with poisonous nonsense to further their cynical power games. As citizens, we all have a responsibility to inform ourselves, to identify and reject lies, and to not fall for nonsense narratives, but as a society, we're creating the conditions for this with things like the disaster that is Facebook as a source of news and information.

Yea, get your news from Kimmel and Colbert and you will be well informed.

Famous Mortimer wrote:

wart57 wrote:

Arthur Dent wrote:

Popeye_Card wrote:There is a pretty universal truth, which I am reminded of this time of year because it is performance appraisal season. Lousy performers hate to be told that they are lousy. That's why they never improve. People with ambition? They appreciate being told where they can improve. Heck, they probably self-recognize their own faults. They can get upset when you don't have enough critical feedback for them. But people who stink? They are floored when you tell them they stink. It is always someone else's fault, or you aren't being fair to them.

I think that applies here. Stupid people hate to be told when they are stupid. Most smart people would be embarrassed to know they were duped by Russian trolls. But the majority of people who were dumb enough to fall for these pretty clearly fake groups to start with? They can't possibly be wrong. Someone ELSE is to blame here.

Alternate interpretation: it is easy to accept feedback in a context where you understand yourself to be valued. Negative feedback in an annual evaluation format where you rightly understand it to be a threat to your livelihood triggers defensiveness and fear, both of which damage relationships and degrade performance. As I understand the research on annual performance reviews, the evidence is that they are ineffective. Management occurs in the day to day and requires skill more challenging to apply than doling out threats and bonuses. The reviews remain, imo, because they are useful as a faux-meritocratic justification of the internal power structure and inequality. Those who have power must always explain it to themselves as deserved. You can see this from British writing about how their cultural superiority justifies their noble conquests of the lesser peoples to American CEOs celebrating themselves as great job creators to whom we must all genuflect. In both cases, a willingness to dismiss the needs of others and readiness crush them when it is personally advantageous is often more useful than merit even in the narrow ideological way it is typically defined.

In the case of Facebook nonsense, my first reaction is that it is super gross the way various powerful players from Fox News, to Republican politicians, to Russian manipulators are destroying people's minds with poisonous nonsense to further their cynical power games. As citizens, we all have a responsibility to inform ourselves, to identify and reject lies, and to not fall for nonsense narratives, but as a society, we're creating the conditions for this with things like the disaster that is Facebook as a source of news and information.

Yea, get your news from Kimmel and Colbert and you will be well informed.

You know that some people get their news from actual news sources, not insane propagandists like Fox News? Or, for that matter, late night talk show hosts? I understand why some people are so desperate to create an equivalency, but it's really not there.

MrCrowesGarden wrote:Anyone else get a crap Twitter update?

Mine did last night and I hate it. Makes it a lot more like Facebook-- no more tweets in chronological order, just things I'm guessing the algorithm guesses I might like... and yet there's still an "in case you missed it" section which as far as I can tell is no different.

Not only that, but it's showing tweets in my feed that people I'm following liked... not retweeted, just liked.

It's entirely useless.