What Kind of World Do We Live In?

I think one big theme in the tiktok about Dollar General is overreaching. It looks plausible to me that most executives and managers are incompetent. I think it could be that most entry level workers are also incompetent in some areas of their jobs too. So, overall there’s incompetence at all levels but the responsibility falls upon the decision makers who are pushing the organization into failures. I guess that this means businesses should be trying to succeed with easier projects and only expand when they are clearly succeeding at everything they already do. From my perspective, running a single store, like a Dollar General, looks really hard. You have to manage inventory, finances, employees, customers, loss prevention, safety, and probably so much more. It seems like it would be overwhelming. I have no idea how much skill or knowledge it would take or how to evaluate whether or not someone might be capable of managing store. When I think about how hard this stuff seems, I’m kinda surprised stuff works at all. The scope of what looks manageable to me is more like running a stall at farmers market or a hot dog stand.

I would be concerned about confrontations with employees or customers because I don’t know what are reasonable expectations for employee management or customer service. I would have very little confidence that I could regularly find common preferences in non-generic cases. Another thought I had about this is that there are so many ways that you could be mistreating people in business without even knowing or at least without knowing whether your the problem or someone else is the problem. A more general idea along these lines is that most people are probably being mistreated in many ways that they don’t even know about or recognize. And most people are probably mistreating others in many ways that they don’t know about or recognize.

CONTEXT: I want to post on this topic because I have been reflecting on the kind of world we live a little since viewing the videos in this topic. I think what I’m saying in this post is mostly a mainstream opinion about male violence and other problems in society.

An idea I have about the world that’s related to the video discussing sexual assualts is that there are a lot of violent people in the world. It seems like most people are potentially dangerous. Not eveyone’s violent potential manifests itself but so many people are capable of personal violence. I think the vast majority of people have unbounded emotions and can experience murderous rage. Problems with being violent are extremely heavily skewed toward men.

Another idea related to violence is that Western culture’s tradtional moral knowledge is thin and fragile. There’s a significant failure rate in that knowledge which causes a significant fraction of men to be violent in the current social context. In a worse social context, like a 1990s-Russia-level of economic collapse, a lot more men would manifest violent behavior.

One more idea I have about this stuff is that a Westerner of 2023 has a lot of overlapping psychological traits with 1940s Nazis and/or people who owned slaves a few hundred years ago. There’s been some definite progress in ideas but I don’t know how robust the improvements are on an individual level. My general impression is that core pyschology and major widespread memes have not been reliably supplanted with principled moral knowledge.

Some questions:
Why are men more violent than women? Is there some moral knowledge that women learn more reliably than men? What moral principles, or lack there of, are involved in male violence? Is there a philosophical idea that men aren’t learning as well?

I think there’s way way more that story in this article conveys about the world than what I can see. One point that stood out to me is that lots people, including high level government people, don’t know basic economics. The dairy subsidy created predictably bad incentives and the government failed to account for the difference between seen vs unseen affects of the policy. Another possibility is that the government people knew something about the bad consequences of the policy and did it anyway because they felt it would be more politically expedient.

Also, at the end of the article the author, after all their criticism of the affects of the policy, proceeds to suggest that the government should also subsidize small farmers. Then they suggest the government should start subsidizing in demand crops but, according to the author, that was exactly how this problem initially came about in 1970s.

I guess this article is an example of the lack of good criticism in the world. Would it help if there were more good criticisms of specific bad policies? I would guess not because it seems like there’s lot of subsidy criticism out there, even standard in Econ 101 material. Maybe the big takeaway is that almost everyone needs to get better at basic reasoning.

I think the manager (or coworker) in that situation might be trying use corporate jargon to sound more authoritative when they don’t have much reasoning to back up their conclusions. The manager wasn’t communicating literally but the person in video was trying to communicate literally in order to understand how to do their job. The manager’s goals were probably social status based and oriented toward demonstrating their conception of leadership and guidance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CPS/comments/13b7fyt/foster_kid_here_yall_have_no_idea_what_the_system/

The Biggest Undercover Dairy Investigation in History - Fair Oaks Farms and Coca Cola on Vimeo

Here’s a response https://www.fox17online.com/2019/06/12/farmer-dont-believe-everything-you-see-about-fair-oaks-undercover-investigation

https://medium.com/the-noösphere/i-joined-a-popular-incel-forum-heres-what-they-really-think-of-women-862eda9f2edf