As someone who did a lot of hiring in my last job, I would push back against the narrative here that it's about lying or behavior policing. Although there is plenty of truth that there's an unfair bias against negativity, I do think there's a very valid reason for hiring managers to care about whether or not an applicant can remain positive or at least objectively neutral in an interview, and be diplomatic about negative experiences.
Invariably, at any company, even if they are a fantastic workplace, you are going to disagree with your lead or coworkers at some point. You will be asked to do work you aren't excited about or don't see value in, and you will be asked to work with people you don't particularly like.
If you aren't able to maintain a fairly positive attitude for a one hour interview, it makes sense that a hiring manager might worry about how well you'll be able to be a team player when things get rough. I used to think it was bullshit, and I learned the hard way. I hired someone who was fairly unpleasant during his interview, because he was the most competent applicant, and it seemed wrong to me to look at anything other than job skills. He was an excellent programmer, but he sucked so much time and energy out from the rest of the team with complaints and arguments. Of course I don't think that's always going to be the case, sometimes people have gone through genuinely negative past work experiences or just have brusque personalities, but I was certainly wary after that of people who couldn't put on a positive attitude for an interview.
This was very much taught in some of the business school electives I took. Some of the projects are quite literally to give a realistic pitch for products or businesses that you never intend to actually build. It might be only be taken as subtextual in the most charitable view, but being able to bullshit like that is definitely taught.
This is part of maturing into the real world. Politics (for lack of a better word) is part of any group of people who spend a lot of time together. We try and try to distill politics out of the workplace as engineers, which, ironically, is precisely why interviews are so positive-biased that they feel slightly fake for some. We don't like those dirty unquantifiable "feelings". Popping up all the time.
Why try to communicate with the people you're asking to pay you a salary using language they're familiar with? Great point. I can't think of a single reason to do that. It’s a great hill to die on.
Is this tact by chance circular in nature? Does it happen to be utilized more frequently during the course of group activities a given management hierarchy is known to regularly participate in?
There’s two reasons to do this - as an interviewer, the way you present yourself to me is the way I expect you’ll present yourself as a representative of the team or company. It’s not good to air dirty laundry publicly, and if you can’t keep it under control when it’s almost an explicit “don’t trash talk your old job” the. There’s basically no hope of it when things are more relaxed.
Secondly, there’s three sides to every story. Yours, theirs and the truth. If I say “my manager is an asshole so I’m leaving his team”, it’s probable that my manager has a different take on it, maybe “maccard said they wanted to be kept in the loop so I am telling them what happening but they accuse me of changing my mind”.
Neither of those answers seem at all dishonest. They just skip past the diagnosed cause to focus on the impact.
Maybe the boss being a raging ass is the root cause of the team moving in the wrong direction. But that may be debatable, and knowing that doesn't answer the interviewer's question. The more relevant piece is that you and the director disagree and that you don't want to waste your time working on something you aren't inspired by.
I don’t see why it would select for fakers or cheaters. I’m totally fine with a job not ending well, but if you leave it as an innuendo like that without explaining, it makes me wonder why it went bad. Makes it sound like you got fired or something, or that you don’t take it seriously.
>Makes it sound like you got fired or something, or that you don’t take it seriously.
My background in academia colors me but the level of office politics some describe in the private sector genuinely sounds like a middle school drama club at times. I've personally witnessed incredibly talented individuals at FAANG companies get the boot for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with their competence. Think messy personal dynamics, bosses having affairs with coworkers aiming for a position.
It makes me wonder about this ingrained necessity for pretense and obfuscation in private sector communication. Why the need to constantly play these games as if acknowledging reality is somehow detrimental? In academia, while not devoid of its own issues, the selection process for students at least attempts to prioritize merit and potential. The idea that some of the most brilliant minds I've encountered might be filtered out by arbitrary corporate "standards," while incapable but politically savvy individuals thrive, seems counterproductive.
So once again, I’m not advocating for games or denying reality. I’m simply advocating for as much clarity as is feasible.
Let’s take your example - boss has an affair with a coworker, you speak up about it, then you get the boot and sign an NDA. In that scenario, I’d probably say something like the following:
“There was an interpersonal incident that was out of my control, and unfortunately I’m not legally allowed to speak about it in detail. What I can say is that I learned how important it is to stand up for what’s right even if it comes at a personal cost.”
This isn’t playing a game, it’s having empathy for the person sitting across the table from you. They have to make a decision on very limited information, and you’re trying to help them make that decision. If I were to just say “hehe let’s just say that something crazy went down, and I’m out of a job.” Well technically I told the truth, but I certainly didn’t help the interviewer make their assessment.
You helped me understand a position I never wrapped my head around before. Thank you!
I've never made a decision on few points of information, often I know researchers or their output for years before we interact, so it makes sense I don't have to care what language they use as this is a low correlation signal on their output.
the TOS goes further and allows you to call gay people abnormal and mentally ill.
"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation."
The carve out also focuses only on LGBT people. If calling someone abnormal and mentally ill can reasonably be considered insulting then according to this TOS you can't say it to someone with ADHD but you can say it to a gay person.
The TOS is not about enforcing truthfulness, it is about promoting good behaviour. For example according to this TOS you cannot call someone stupid if they have limited intellectual capacity. It doesn't matter if it's true or not because that's not the purpose of the TOS. I can't see any reason for a carve out specifically for LGBT people that allows this sort of technically justifiable insulting language when there is no such carve out for other groups.
Taste is subjective, and if you find her style boring I can't dispute that, but it doesn't match my experience at all.
I think judging her by the most popularly-upvoted snippets on Goodreads is doing her a tremendous disservice. Her language is not particularly flowery, and she writes using simple words, which are often the ones that have the vaguest meanings and the most room for nuance. If you take a single sentence like that from a story or novel, and remove it from its surrounding context, you strip away a lot of that nuance. By reading the sentence in isolation, you only see a pale shadow of its intended meaning.
Maybe this is a bad analogy, but it makes me think of how you wouldn't think there was anything interesting about Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture if all you heard was the cannon volleys by themselves, even though they're what make the piece complete.
I think Earthsea and Hainish are both great, but I don't like any of her other stuff, and don't like this TTC (or really any of the English translations I've seen) either. They all lose the poetry which is obvious at a glance in the original. I only know a few words of Mandarin and can't read the glyphs at all, but I've picked my way through with a dictionary and MTL - the structure of the original is obviously not reflected in any of the English translations. I think English is just too explicit and doesn't have enough "overloading" to capture the depth.
A lot of prose in the Dispossessed is great and there's nothing impersonal or robotic about it, quite the opposite.
"We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere"
From the same book, the "it is our suffering that brings us together" passage has burned itself into my mind and has often been a comfort in dark times. I can't imagine finding it impersonal or robotic. Frank and unadorned, perhaps. And both of these quotes are spoken by a person who is specifically noted to have a very blunt, concrete way of speaking. She could be more poetical when she chose to be.
Hard disagree. I find Le Guin's prose breathtakingly gorgeous. And then it hits you like a brick wall.
> The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got threequarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.
I can't imagine anyone loving "the idea" of Le Guin who hasn't read her books. What an idea. It's not like she's famous enough to have acolytes who spout her stuff without having read it. And what's "the idea" of Le Guin? Just that she's a female sci fi writer? I'm missing the implication.
I love her books and have for over 20 years.
And I can't imagine that any author looks good when subjected to the "GoodReads snippets" treatment. Can you find an example of an author coming off well? What snippets get upvoted by people? It's all going to sound like trite stuff, for any author.
Can't say I love any books, but I greatly enjoy sci-fi (especially when they respect orbital mechanics). ULG's style reminds me of Strugacky brothers, maybe that was just typical in that era?
It might be that my memory is playing tricks on me, it was over 10 years since I read any of them (except for one non-sci-fi ULG book). But generally the writing style evolves end deeply personal style is much more common now then it was before. (I think I've read most of ULG and maybe half of B&A Strugackie's books).
That doesn't read like science, it reads like an ideological statement. The current punishment for scientific fraud is non-existent and academia is full of it and ideologically driven pseudoscientific research.
Subsequent evidence debunked that "post-mortem", as another user posted.
We've seen, with evidence, China pressure research groups and Nature into calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. Like "fake news", "conspiracy theory" is now actively used by China as a way to shut down evidence.
From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, privately believed the theory was likely.
Government covert operations are not the kind of phenomenon science can properly study because it's not reproducible and data is not open. It's the realm of investigative journalism and intelligence.
I would quite strongly disagree with you here. When researchers engage in academic dishonesty, it not only tends to have extremely negative consequences for themselves in terms of ability to publish, acquire grants, etc but it also directly and significantly affects the journals they published in. And in the case of the COVID stuff, public health officials who officially mislead people may also face criminal consequences, with ongoing investigations pursuing that exact outcome this very moment. [1]
But when journalists or intelligence agencies lie, exactly nothing happens. Intelligence agencies clearly see lying as just part of their retinue of weapons. And the media in general has mostly become a mixture of entertainment and bias confirmation. The internet seems to have largely killed the traditional role of the media as the bearer of information and knowledge on the happenings of the day.
While public health officials may face criminal charges, Nature magazine editors and the team of researchers that were contacted by the Chinese government and lied walked away with nothing close to extremely negative consequences. I didn't claim public health officials can fraud without consequence, I said researchers can. I can't find one instance of misleading science for political purposes lead to academic consequences for fraudulent researchers. There were researchers arrested for connections with Chinese Military by the US government but if it were up to Harvard I speculate nothing would be done, because it never has been done, as far as I know and looked at.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-...
I also didn't claim Journalists and Intelligence Agencies are bearers of truth but it stands that to study something like Lab Leak or Havana Syndrome is a question in the realm of investigation, not science. No?
Peter is risking criminal consequences based on evidence gathered by investigation, not the scientific process. Also not because of purposefully misleading research but dangerous research and lies while testifying, which isn't fraudulent science.
I feel like you're getting close to pulling a no true Scotsman here with claiming that Peter Daszak isn't being "really" punished (even though he's now lost all funding, will likely be debarred preventing him from securing future Federal funding, and his career is basically dead) because of the "medium" through which he was/is being punished.
But if you want a more general case, just check out Retraction Watch. You'll find that consequences are very real, they're just not the sort that typically make the news. For instance looking up cases at Harvard, I randomly picked Sam W Lee. [1] The final charge against him was in 2019. Since then he has not only been terminated at Harvard, but has not had a single publication - meaning he likely has been unable to find a position at another university, nor has he been able to independently publish. [2]
