Note: crossposting from reddit, because I spent way too long on this to not have a backup. — Honestly, I have had a good number of managers and they all were bad in fairly different ways, but if I have to choose one single complaint, it is sheer incompetence. Incompetent workers shoot themselves on their feet. When it is a manager*, and they make decisions that impact an entire team, metaphorically is like they are shooting themselves on their feet, making a hole in the boat on which the team is, so everybody drowns. Their bad decisions make work frustrating, unproductive, unrewarding, and sometimes plain impossible with respect to some deadlines.

Using the Ethereum merge of September 2022 as an example for contextualization. — Perspective 1: it is already priced in This is the perspective of the efficient market hypothesis. According to this hypothesis: The information about this event has been available for a while, actions were taken accordingly, and any potential price movement has already happened. i.e. after something has been reported when the information became readily available, there is…

If you consider it a problem at all — There are many problems with the cryptocurrency reputation. Here is a great compilation: Web3 is going just great Scams, exploits, honest mistakes, lack of regulation attracting bad actors, VCs that put their money where their mouth is but cannot answer simple questions, fundraising for dubious events,… There is no shortage…

Or why people do too much of what is already abundant — People keep doing more of what is already abundant and miss the opportunities to do more of what is scarce and necessary. The salience bias is one of the reasons for this. For example, we live in a time of information overload. People keep producing information in copious quantities and…

But the decision-makers may not care to understand them — Most knowledge workers find themselves in one of two situations: They need to sell their ideas to some decision-makers. Their ideas are incomprehensible to the decision-makers. They are radically different situations, but both are worrisome and result in irrationality.1 Idea success depends mainly on how it is sold Or bad ideas sold well beat good ideas sold poorly. This…

Some economic incentives for irrational behavior — “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair Large companies invest in their own departments and projects in a way similar to venture capital investors: diversifying.1 While the logical or rational choices may be one or…

Because there is so much to learn, and so little time — One reason for irrationality is: Avoid considering the situation or context for decision-making. That requires hard thinking. Choose the most general approach, i.e. it makes the least number of assumptions about the context for its application and works in most contexts. The most general approach is likely to be the…

I did not have the time to write a short letter, so I did not really write one — “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.” — Winston Churchill ☕ “Brute force is enough.” “…all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. …