On the 1st of October, a gunman opened sustained machine gun fire on a music festival in Las Vegas, killing 59 and injuring hundreds more. Police and investigators still have no idea why. The gunman was a success by the standards of our society, a multimillionaire real estate developer who lived a privileged life as a high roller. He had no criminal history, no mental health problems, no discernable ideology. Yet he assembled an arsenal of 42 guns and planned his pre-meditated attack on a crowd of concert-goers. For all his material success, he must have been entirely unfulfilled by his life to even contemplate such an action.
Category: Posts
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Superheroes and the God Emperor – A Cry For Salvation
Superheroes are enjoying an extended renaissance in popular culture. Five of the top 20 grossing films of all time have been superhero movies released within the past five years. At the same time, populist politicians have garnered their own fandoms with promises of strong action and simple solutions. Donald Trump is the God Emperor. Jeremy Corbyn is The Absolute Boy. I posit that these two trends are linked as a societal cry for someone who can fix the world by their power alone.
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What If Inaction On Climate Change Is Deliberate?
We believe that climate change represents one of the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenges of our age.
Australia now stands ready to assume its responsibility in responding to this challenge – both at home and in the complex negotiations which lie ahead across the community of nations.
For Australians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. It is no longer a scientific theory. It is an emerging reality. In fact, what we see today is a portent of things to come.
In Australia, our inland rivers are dying; bushfires are becoming more ferocious, and more frequent; and our unique natural wonders – the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, our rainforests – are now at risk.
This will sound familiar to many of our Pacific neighbours who are experiencing the impacts of rising sea levels, more frequent severe weather events and diminishing access to fresh water. And regrettably it is now an increasingly familiar story across the globe, as reflected in the critical conclusions of the Fourth IPCC Report released last month.
Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Our choice will impact all future generations. This is, therefore, a problem which requires a global solution. It requires a multilateral solution. Unilateral action is not enough. We must all share the burden.
– Kevin Rudd, in his 2007 address to the UN.
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For Love or Money
I’ve always been keen to do work that I find intellectually challenging and worthwhile. If you have to spend half your waking life working, you should make the best use of that time and do something which will be worthwhile, both in terms of a useful outcome rather than a bullshit job (yes, its the Graeber piece, and yes, I’m going to keep linking it forever) and in terms of personal growth. Or at worst, one of the two. But it seems like I’m in a substantial minority on this, judging from the incredulous reactions I get to the idea of intellectual stagnation in a career. I’ll address that point once I get around to writing my treatise on intellectual stagnation and our society. But for now, I’m interested in looking at whether enough additional money can be sufficient to make up for a job which is unfulfilling.
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Australian Job Satisfaction
I’m pulling together some research for a longer post, but I came across a paper which merited a separate look by itself. Blanchflower and Oswald’s 2005 paper looked at reported satisfaction of folks in a range of countries, as a counterpart to the Human Development Index (HDI). Although Australia ranks highly on the HDI (now 2nd per the most recent data), they found that Australia performs poorly on a range of happiness indicators, particularly job satisfaction. Are we flipping the old stereotypes and becoming whinging Aussies, or are there other effects at play?
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Unstructured Interviews Are Bad Predictors Of Candidate Performance
Perhaps the greatest technological achievement in industrial and organizational (I–O) psychology over the past 100 years is the development of decision aids (e.g., paper-and-pencil tests, structured interviews, mechanical combination of predictors) that substantially reduce error in the prediction of employee performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Arguably, the greatest failure of I–O psychology has been the inability to convince employers to use them.
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How We Confuse Confidence With Competence
We have come up with a solution that is really, really, I think very good. Now I have to tell you, its an unbelievably complex subject, nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.
– US President Donald Trump, demonstrating how the incompetent lack the cognitive tools to understand their own shortcomings or accurately assess others.
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The prisons of our own self-images
We all have understandings of our own strengths and weaknesses, abilities and expectations, forming a self-image, or a mental model of the person we are. But these often become hardwired, with a whole bunch of cognitive effects together with the difficulty in getting objective information making it rather difficult to re-evaluate your own understandings. Outdated beliefs in your own ability or lack thereof can act to drive your career in suboptimal directions or inhibit your confidence, as well as impacting on your own direction in the world. I’m going to run through an example which has belted this home for me and inspired this post.