
Turtleocracy - tobr
https://www.notion.so/Turtleocracy-47a6df7692bf4e95a39504a73a50a295
======
keiferski
This seems like an overly-complex derivation of Isaiah Berlin's concept of
_The Hedgehog and the Fox_ :

 _Berlin...divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who
view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given
include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel
Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of
experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea
(examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William
Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr
Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson)._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox)

~~~
wk0
Is the Hedgehog and the Fox just an overly-complex (but more concrete)
derivation of monism vs pluralism?

~~~
m463
I have to think of: "there are two types of people in the world - those who
divide the world up into two types of people, and those that don't"

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derefr
I thought this would be fluff, but this is a genuinely interesting schema for
modelling research-type organizations that I haven’t seen before. (If you
think it’s “just X”, the page does spend some time clearly compare-and-
contrasting with anything you might think to analogize it to. It’s not quite
any existing thing.) It probably _is_ consultingware of some form, but I don’t
mind scavenging insight from a predatory situation if there’s some there to be
taken.

One thing I would like to see, though, is a list of historical evidence that
this paradigm does better than the standard academic “publish papers to gain
notoriety” paradigm. Turtleocracy _has_ been tried before, I’m sure, even if
by accident—there are only so many relationship graphs a small set of humans
can end up in. I’m pretty sure some private research organizations work[ed]
like this?

But I’d like an analysis of how much their working-like-this contributed to
their success or lack thereof. It’d be interesting to contrast different
private research institutions, e.g. {Bell Labs, RCA Labs, maybe Oak Ridge?} on
their comparative Turtleocracy-ness vs their comparative “throughput” in
pumping out new foundational knowledge (which I assume is the goal here.)

~~~
edelwax
Yes, right, Turtleocracy is partly modeled on PARC, Bell Labs, etc. But I
don't begin to know how to answer this question about "how much their working-
like-this contributed to their success or lack thereof" \-- are you an
organizational sociologist? If you have some methodological ideas here, I'd
love to hear them.

I'm not sure where people are getting the consultingware idea. We don't have
any consulting relationships with businesses at all. Guess our copy is
misleading somewhere?

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seemslegit
Ah yes another shot at the kind of people vulnerable to the "organizations
aligning themselves around a detached yet critically objective outsider while
enabling them with their expertise and ideas and crediting them with the
outcome, no hard skills required, just your own innate passion and curiosity
!" fantasy.

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foo_barington3
This reads as coming from the disgruntled perspective of a 'turtle' who
resents the strong opinions of 'rabbits' and the lack of experimentalism of
'birds'. Little consideration is given to the value of the other animals
except as an inferior contrast to the turtles. An optimal solution would not
be a 'Turtleocracy' (tyranny of turtles) but a balanced ecosystem where
different strengths are given their due, and no group has tyranny over
another.

~~~
aidenn0
From the first linked page[1]:

> Most organizations should not be turtleocracies. It depends on what your
> organization wants to do, and whether it's never been done before.

> 1\. When you must _do_ things well, in the standard way, you need experts.
> You can put them together into an _expert bureaucracy,_ a _consultancy,_
> etc.

> 2\. When _most things can go poorly_ , but you hope _some things_ work out,
> you can use people with ideas and energy without needing turtles. You can
> put them together into a _do-ocracy_ or _startup ecosystem_.

> 3\. But, when you must _do things well_ , in a way that's never been done
> before, you need "takeless" people, without strong ideas, who will slowly
> experiment over years. You can put them together into a Turtleocracy.

1: [https://www.notion.so/Is-Turtleocracy-Right-for-Your-
Organiz...](https://www.notion.so/Is-Turtleocracy-Right-for-Your-
Organization-b94b794aa04d41e4b25f3560025253c7)

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moron4hire
Why do we have to zoomorphize concepts like this? Scrum had it, with the
chickens and pigs. To me, it just muddies the understanding of the thing,
because you have to remember some story or joke about the origin of the
specific zoomorphization. It's also really hard to get people to take the
process seriously when the process treats itself like a children's story.

~~~
danharaj
Everything is a metaphor, you probably prefer inanimate metaphors (like
channels, pipes, scripts, keys, libraries, etc.) But metaphors involving
animals being considered more childish and less serious is purely due to your
cultural milieu.

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Xophmeister
This model doesn't seem too far removed from academia; at least in the "ideal"
sense, ignoring the realities of attracting funding and academic politics. The
turtle would go from PhD student to tenured professors; rabbits might be
undergrads or non-academic faculty staff; birds might be people like
librarians and lab techs.

~~~
Matticus_Rex
I don't think that even works in the ideal -- academics in my experience are
something like 45% rabbits and 45% birds, with a small cadre of turtles who
manage to survive the politics and bs of academia because their research
output is just so strong.

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codezero
What even is this? Why does it seem to lead to a paid $2000 course? [0] What
is the goal, and who is involved? It seems very high minded and deep on the
surface, but what are the expected outcomes and timelines of this, system?

[0]
[https://www.notion.so/HS101-Deluxe-9c92efe621a04d2886e2986ce...](https://www.notion.so/HS101-Deluxe-9c92efe621a04d2886e2986cec1ea1bd)

~~~
seemslegit
It's called a coaching scam

~~~
whatshisface
It's also called "management consulting." An article was on the top of HN the
other day where the George Washington University was getting some, and
apparently in that case the top decision-makers were treated to Disneyland
Resort. What is this group offering compared to that?

~~~
codezero
On the surface it sounds like they are offering access to a network of
connected and wealthy individuals with a hint that you might get paid to do
research on one of their questions.

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smacktoward
All those words, and it never answers the most pressing question: is this
philosophy turtley enough for the Turtle Club?

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sosilkj
Is Notion affiliated with Somalia in some way? Or are companies just picking
TLDs out of a hat at this point?

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siphium
I love notion as a tool but it seems like one of those things people will be
crying about in a few years if we continue to put all this valuable
information solely in their hands. (yes i know you can export but it doesn't
preserve the awesome format they have which is really the point)

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tomp
Really? Browsing through this site a bit completely turned me off Notion...
like, the page is so slow to load, as if the rendering was happening on the
client side, not the server side... Can't they just generate & cache the HTML
and serve it?

Edit: they also hijack Ctrl-click which I consider extra shitty and non-user-
friendly.

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munk-a
They _also_ hijack the arrow keys, which is basically heresy.

~~~
siphium
I agree the web interface is absolutely horrible. I use the desktop app. They
allow you to export html from there and preserve the nested document structure
(the main feature imo). I've seen writeups about people building nocode apps
on notion so I think their idea might be to create an ecosystem where they can
ignore respected conventions.

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femiagbabiaka
I know it’s likely not the intent, but this reads a little like raison d'être
for McKinsey.

~~~
svaha1728
the wolveocracy?

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pjc50
Someone's very annoyed with Twitter's tendency to produce "hot takes"..

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PragmaticPulp
These mental models can be an interesting perspective, but please take them
with a grain of salt. The more branding, marketing, cute names, and emojies
applied to a mental model, the more you should be suspicious.

This "Turtleocracy" model might help bring some insight or inspiration in
certain challenging environments, but be careful about assuming you're in a
"Turtleocracy" or stereotyping people into "Rabbit" or "Bird". It's tempting
to reach for these systems and stereotypes when you're in conflict with
someone because it gives you a sense of having the upper hand. Ironically,
doing so will turn you into the very person this article warns about in the
section about Tyranny of People with "Takes". Always be on the look out for
signs that you're wrong or that you've misunderstood the situation.

In my experience, it's healthy to have a variety of different models and
perspectives through which you can view situations. It's not healthy, however,
to try to force every situation to fit your favorite mental model. When you
all have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Don't be that guy.

~~~
edelwax
Strongly agree!

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forgotmypw16
Blank page...

[http://archive.is/ly6T4](http://archive.is/ly6T4)

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edelwax
Hi, I'm one of the creators of turtleocracy. I'll be responding to questions
below.

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viach
Just imagine what a corrupted group of turtle + rabbit + bird could achieve in
such an organization.

~~~
edelwax
Yes, for sure. This is a known weakness, mentioned on the page. We hope to
test ways to make turtleocracy robust against sociopathic conspiracies and
fake turtles over the next year.

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pow_ext
Wow, first Notion article i've seen here, that platform is so great, i'm so
happy :)

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seemslegit
I wonder if this can be rephrased in terms of walruses, carpenters and oysters

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
To continue with the example, many times turtles when slowly crossing the
highway of innovation get run over by the trucks of disruption that they did
not see when they started to cross the highway.

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the_greyd
[https://www.notion.so/Fundraising-c5092becfe074069b8252fb866...](https://www.notion.so/Fundraising-c5092becfe074069b8252fb866aaa30a)
<\- tl;dr it's a startup teaching stuff to other people/companies/startups.

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whatshisface
Now we finally have an organizational philosophy centered around listless
bureaucrats.

Actually, we already have a lot of those. Highly conservative organizations
that ascribe a very low probability of success to any particular effort are
common and arise on their own without any coaching required. All it takes is a
few failed projects in the professional history of the leaders, whether at
that organization or elsewhere. Unless your leadership is full of
20-somethings who have never seen an idea not work out, a far more important
problem is avoiding the scenario where nobody wants to takes risks because the
benefits go to the company but the failure would be pinned on them.

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aloisdg
A bit off topic, but is there a name for this trend to put emoji everywhere? I
have some trouble to read like that. There is a kind of Madeleine de Proust
though, it feel like children book:
[https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2b9571fc
--rebus-books-teachers-toolbox.jpg)

~~~
siphium
I think it's a marketing trend. The emojis seem like a soft universal language
to help people who don't speak English grok broken google translations.

Hoping to hear the name for this trend as it's a very interesting one indeed.
Done well it seems like this is definitely the new wave as we continue to dumb
everything down to the lowest common denominator. Done poorly, well I've done
this and will just tell you the results are about as bad as you'd expect.

~~~
codezero
The language component hasn’t occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once
supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn’t helping much, so we
resorted to a combination of screenshots, boxes, arrows, and emojis and it
ended well :)

~~~
setr
However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the
animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non-
english speaker.

In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest
concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion.

Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic
writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will
only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign
multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take
you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.

~~~
codezero
Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said
- I think it makes sense.

I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if
the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then
again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the
easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are
right.

With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist
memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm
trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.

~~~
setr
Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻

They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's
what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend
they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their
existence.

The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly
optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun,
and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're
representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite
(or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more
likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the
BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.

I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than
Apple's emoji

~~~
codezero
I don't think of things as so fixed. I think anything that is "for X" can
become "for Y" if it's used creatively enough, so we'll see :)

~~~
setr
I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other
potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently
complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression.

Any useful utility for emoji will be at best _in addition to_ written
language, not in replacement of it.

And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very
strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition,
the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope
for significant creativity to appear

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davidw
I was sort of wondering if it was going to be about or related to Yurtle the
Turtle

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_Stories#%E2%80%9CYertle_the_Turtle%E2%80%9D)

