CN CREW-VESSEL posted:

I'd love to see the key they use to score that.

Proust Malone posted:

The decoration for bravery lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

ikanreed posted:

I'm guessing some of those items indicate valuing social judgement over personal morality.

They want people who do what they're told.

Entorwellian posted:

These should be the application questions to becoming an SA moderator.

StealthArcher posted:

blatman posted:

it's probably just "time taken to complete" except you have to hit just the right time based on pseudoscientific hr stuff - too fast and you didn't care enough, too slow and you're an unemployable potato

ynohtna posted:

Instead they get people skilled at telling HR (and other authorities) what they want to hear. The systemic effects of this are fun.

BonHair posted:

Hi, I've written a lot of job applications and been in a few interviews based on those.

Semi related, I had a boss who absolutely aced her leadership exams and all the recruiter tests, but when she was finally fired (long after I left) they had to bring in psychological counselling for the remaining team.

bedpan posted:

I imagine she went onto better and brighter things if she had this sort of an impact!

BonHair posted:

Hi, I've written a lot of job applications and been in a few interviews based on those.

Semi related, I had a boss who absolutely aced her leadership exams and all the recruiter tests, but when she was finally fired (long after I left) they had to bring in psychological counselling for the remaining team.

Subjunctive posted:

what kind of freak show were you at where they published recruiter evaluations and leadership test resukts?

Subjunctive posted:

what kind of freak show were you at where they published recruiter evaluations and leadership test resukts?

Panfilo posted:

Whew I was thinking this comment was going to take a darker turn
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1791536835837006015?t=FOsGlq4QqcM0D1UFhHmEhQ&s=19

Panfilo posted:

Whew I was thinking this comment was going to take a darker turn
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1791536835837006015?t=FOsGlq4QqcM0D1UFhHmEhQ&s=19

Owlbear Camus posted:

How many "useless, worthless" people in "africa and south asia" relegated to "cheap labor" have the potential to be an Important Public Intellectual like Yuval Noah Harari (but hopefully less evil) except for where they ended up in the birth lottery?

relegating whole continents to "useless eaters" based on pie-in-the-sky AI evangelism, drat. deeply sinister guy.

Carthag Tuek posted:

utilitarianism fascism hedonism pipeline

GotLag posted:

Stephen Jay Gould posted:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

GotLag posted:

Ruffian Price posted:

Peggotty posted:

The ending of his stupid book got more insane with every sentence.

Every single person (or, to be precise, man) who writes a "this is my one theory that explains the entirety of human history here are 5 examples from ancient egypt to modern day new york city and by the way don't even have a history degree lol" book should be sentenced to life in prison and everyone who ever praised on of these books should have to go to school again.

Peggotty posted:

The ending of his stupid book got more insane with every sentence.

Every single person (or, to be precise, man) who writes a "this is my one theory that explains the entirety of human history here are 5 examples from ancient egypt to modern day new york city and by the way don't even have a history degree lol" book should be sentenced to life in prison and everyone who ever praised on of these books should have to go to school again.

Peggotty posted:

The ending of his stupid book got more insane with every sentence.

Every single person (or, to be precise, man) who writes a "this is my one theory that explains the entirety of human history here are 5 examples from ancient egypt to modern day new york city and by the way don't even have a history degree lol" book should be sentenced to life in prison and everyone who ever praised on of these books should have to go to school again.

Fitzy Fitz posted:

The only things I remember are that he thinks sports are religions and we're going to turn into cyber people (?).

BonHair posted:

With the amount of cyber sex in back in the day, surely a lot of cyber people are out there now

Biplane posted:

my night elf girlfriend is real now??

StealthArcher posted:

CN CREW-VESSEL posted:

Harari is like middlebrow crack.

I wish I knew the formula to use to write one of these inane garbage books that takes MET subscribers by storm.

Biplane posted:

this is woke. e: anyway im incorporated in ironforge, the forge fathers there usually rule in favor of the husband

the dawn of everything posted:

In the last chapter, we suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet. Consider the following passage from the historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Harari starts off with a perfectly reasonable observation: that our knowledge of early human history is extremely limited, and social arrangements probably varied a great deal from place to place. True, he overstates his case (he suggests we can really know nothing, even about the Ice Age), but the basic point is well taken. Then we get this:

quote:

The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing … scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.

So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be … another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point of difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live – which is precisely, as Boehm reminds us, what apes don’t do. Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

The best part of the dawn of everything is when they postulate that early modern Europeans were nasty greedy murderous brutes who couldn't even imagine freedom until Native Americans taught them the concept, all while somehow completely clowning on the idea of the noble savage

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

The best part of the dawn of everything is when they postulate that early modern Europeans were nasty greedy murderous brutes who couldn't even imagine freedom until Native Americans taught them the concept, all while somehow completely clowning on the idea of the noble savage

quote:

Historians sometimes like to turn this question on its head. It is wheat, they remind us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat.

Yuval Harari waxes eloquent on this point, asking us to think ‘for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat’. Ten thousand years ago, he points out, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on.30

There’s something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process ‘from the viewpoint of wheat’. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well … a sort of grass. Of course, there are non-human species that have, in a sense, domesticated themselves – the house mouse and sparrow are among them, and so too probably the dog, all found, incidentally, in Early Neolithic villages of the Middle East. It’s also undoubtedly true that, over the long term, ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them.

But to make sense of the beginnings of Neolithic farming, we surely need to try and see it from the perspective of the Palaeolithic, not of the present, and still less from the viewpoint of some imaginary race of bourgeois ape-men. Of course, this is harder to do, but the alternative is to slip back into the realms of myth-making: retelling the past as a ‘just-so’ story, which makes our present situation seem somehow inevitable or preordained. Harari’s retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it’s based on any evidence, but because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we’re back in the Garden of Eden. Except now, it’s not a wily serpent who tricks humanity into sampling the forbidden fruit of knowledge. It’s the fruit itself (i.e. the cereal grains).

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a ‘fairly comfortable life’, subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life – of surplus and luxury, of living like gods – we had to go and tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.