Fortunate

There's nothing wrong with being lucky; "hard work" isn't the only means to worthwhile ends in life.

I'm not normally the sort to wish people luck. Luck, for me, is when external factors come together in ways outside of one's control to create a positive outcome. And while that can be utterly amazing, it is, more or less by definition, unreliable.

That said, there's nothing wrong with being lucky. And so I find the tendency of LinkedIn posts to downplay, or even deny, the role of luck to be curious. Especially, when the only other alternative seems to be "working hard." What happened to things like skill, vision, determination, endurance, intuition and cleverness? I'd rather work smarter than harder any day of the week, and I suspect that when people speak exclusively about how their hard work led to success, they're leaving out all of the factors (including luck) that they used to multiply that effort into the outcomes they attained. Because a lot of people work very hard on a day-to-day basis. There are very many fewer successful people than there are hard workers.

But I get it. Saying "the luckier I was, the more my hard work paid off" or "the trick is to be prepared to make the best of good fortune, if it arrives" can give the impression that success was not earned, but gifted. And the idea that success must be earned feels more "fair." But fair is where pigs go to win prizes (sometimes, with the help of remarkably literate spiders); it's not a governing principle of the Universe.

That said, I still plan to wish people skill, wisdom and knowledge, rather than luck. Because these are things that people can count on; and when they can't, they can always improve them. But if it turns out that the stars have aligned, and dropped something incredible into their laps, I will still celebrate their good fortune with them. (But they're picking up the tab.)

Learned

At the top of the list for highest projected total change in employment between last year and 2033 is "home health and personal care aide." According to the data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 800,000 new home health and personal care aide jobs will be created in that timeframe. In 2023, the median salary was just over $33,500 annually. Or just under $16 an hour. I suspect that it would be more here, since it takes more than $16 an hour to get people to work in McDonald's or a local grocery store. Home health and personal care aide is near the bottom of the salary table, but it isn't alone. Of the 20 listed roles, 11 of them pay less than the current median wage in the United States.

Preventing economic inequality from growing wider is not going to be a matter of having home health and personal care aides or fast food and counter workers making substantially more money. Mainly because that's unlikely to happen. While one can always point the finger at "corporate greed" or "billionaires" (and I'm sure that people will), the fact of the matter is that the people who employ those roles, families, nursing homes, franchise owners et cetera, aren't likely to have the income of the wealth themselves to pay significantly higher salaries.

So what will need to happen is that the jobs that need to grow the fastest need to be the ones that provide greater value more broadly.

Complaining about the cost of health care has become a form of virtue signalling in the modern United States. But maybe what really needs to shift is the public discourse around education. The highest paying jobs in the United States, generally speaking, have high educational barriers to entry. If it takes a Master's degree to become a computer and information systems manager, then the overall number of them is going to be limited.

The cliché is that "education is wasted on the young." But maybe the problem that needs to be tackled now is that 12+ years of schooling is wasted on most retail jobs. Surely, with that long a period of mandatory education, it's possible to give people the skills to do more than barely get by in modern technological economy.

Who Knows

The easiest way to prove a hypothesis is to present it to people who already believe its truth.

This is a more difficult thing for me to remember than it should be, I think. It's easy for me to be skeptical of those things that strike me as completely wonky or suspiciously convenient. But those are not the things that I need to be actively skeptical of; I'm already inclined to not take them at face value. Instead, the things that seem just "right enough" are the ones that need to spend some time investigating, before taking them to be true.

The tricky part of this, outside of simply finding the time that would be required to do all the research, is understanding myself to not have a sufficient grasp of the world around me to understand what is and is not rational to subscribe to a belief in. To be sure, I'm not convinced that this is a reasonable way to go about things, even given my general level of skepticism. Expecting the unexpected is more difficult than is let on, and so understanding that the fact that my view of the world has turned out to be fairly workable thus far doesn't mean that it will continue to be so takes more effort than I commonly plan for. And the payoff is limited. The reason why people are capable of such a diversity of beliefs about the world is that most of them make no difference; the ones that do, there tends to be broad agreement on precisely because of the impact that it makes. Most of the random things that people present to me that turn out to be false when I research them are completely unimportant. My life would not be materially different if I had been instead inclined to take them at face value.

And I suspect that this is the biggest obstacle in anyone's search for truths about the world; most of them are simply unimportant, and this means that they lack any sort of feedback mechanism.

Question Carefully

So LinkedIn invited me to view a "collaborative article," where the topic was: "Your external vendor misses a crucial deadline. How can you ensure program delivery stays on track?" The feedback request says: "We created this article with the help of AI. What do you think of it?" And the options are "It's great," or "It's not so great."

"It's not so great," is actually intended to mean "It's actively bad," because the reasons you have to choose from are things like "It’s not on a professional topic" or "It contains stereotypes or bias." But I thought the question was "not so great," not because it was actively bad, but because it's the wrong question. (And it is a bit unclear; what "on track" means, for instance, is left to the reader.)

By the time an external vendor actually misses a crucial deadline, the remediation plan should likely have already been initiated. Because: "The external vendor providing Deliverable X will miss their delivery date," is a foreseeable risk. The number of things that can blow up a delivery is infinite. And the vendor's project plan should have the reasonable ones noted, and the vendor PM should be communicating status of active risks with in-house program management. Especially when an entire program is riding on that delivery. The missed deadline may be a disappointment, but it shouldn't be a surprise, especially if it's "crucial."

These sorts of questions, that ask about recovering from problems rather than preventing or mitigating them, are common. I encountered one when I took my first manager training class, about a quarter century ago (and I still remember it quite clearly). So I'm not surprised that an LLM trained on the contents of the Internet would ask one. And, to be sure, there's value in knowing what to do when the unexpected happens. But the quick recap of advice that is presented covers things that should have already been done, like "Assess the impact and scope of the delay" and "Develop contingency plans." And activities like "Communicate with the vendor to understand the reasons for the miss" should be part of the postmortem/lessons learned, not the immediate risk response (what I would want to know in the moment are what obstacles to delivery they still face). It was advice that indicated that this wasn't something that had been planned for, as opposed to something that hadn't gone according to plan.

I don't know who looked at the question before it was put out there. But this goes back to one of the problems with LLMs; if one doesn't know the subject matter, it's often difficult to assess an LLM's output. The question, as asked, is reasonable on its face, but strikes me as wonky, because the LLM has simulated expertise in language, but not so much in Program Management. It can't ask questions about questions in the same way that people can.

Obsession

It's a general article of faith that Americans are dumb, especially among Americans themselves, who will constantly remind anyone who will listen, it seems, about how stupid their countrymen are. I've come to the conclusion that Americans are quite intelligent and highly educated... when it come to things that they're interested in.

Some pictures are worth 1,000 words. This one seems set to last 1,000 years.

I was in Target the other day, and came across this issue of People magazine, which has dredged up the Jonbenét Ramsey case. I would say I don't know why, but of course I do; People's editors are of the opinion that their readership is still interested in the case enough to by magazines and read about it. I would presume that they are correct in this, after all, predicting what the audience wants to read and giving it to them is their job, and I have no reason to think that they're bad at it.

The cover stood out for me mainly because I've considered the Ramsey murder case to be ancient history for past two decades, and the fact that it's a cover story, even with all of the other things going on in the world. People is, to be sure, a gossip magazine, as opposed to news or commentary. That's why it's in a rack near the checkout stands; that's where the gossip magazines go, because it's presumed that when older women go to the grocery store, this is the sort of thing that will catch their eye. No one has, as of yet, managed to elevate policy discussions to the same level of interest, even though a lot of political news comes off as just as gossipy as this cold case.

The difference, I think, is that the search for whomever killed a little girl nearly 30 years ago doesn't come with any expectation that the reader will do anything. They can just sit back and be, basically, entertained (although maybe diverted is a better word) by the story. A story about policy might come with, even if only by implication, a call to action. A cold case story rarely will.

The general disengagement of the public as a whole works better than one might presume. It serves the interests of the political system, since it limits the number of active stakeholders who need to be placated, and it serves the interests of the public by allowing them to place their attention on things that are valuable and/or interesting to them. These might be short-term interests, but sometimes, it seems that those are the only sorts of interests that exist.