This seems like an overly-complex derivation of Isaiah Berlin's concept of The Hedgehog and the Fox:
Berlin...divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson).
I thought this would be fluff, but this is a genuinely interesting schema for modelling research-type organizations that I haven’t seen before. (If you think it’s “just X”, the page does spend some time clearly compare-and-contrasting with anything you might think to analogize it to. It’s not quite any existing thing.) It probably is consultingware of some form, but I don’t mind scavenging insight from a predatory situation if there’s some there to be taken.
One thing I would like to see, though, is a list of historical evidence that this paradigm does better than the standard academic “publish papers to gain notoriety” paradigm. Turtleocracy has been tried before, I’m sure, even if by accident—there are only so many relationship graphs a small set of humans can end up in. I’m pretty sure some private research organizations work[ed] like this?
But I’d like an analysis of how much their working-like-this contributed to their success or lack thereof. It’d be interesting to contrast different private research institutions, e.g. {Bell Labs, RCA Labs, maybe Oak Ridge?} on their comparative Turtleocracy-ness vs their comparative “throughput” in pumping out new foundational knowledge (which I assume is the goal here.)
Yes, right, Turtleocracy is partly modeled on PARC, Bell Labs, etc. But I don't begin to know how to answer this question about "how much their working-like-this contributed to their success or lack thereof" -- are you an organizational sociologist? If you have some methodological ideas here, I'd love to hear them.
I'm not sure where people are getting the consultingware idea. We don't have any consulting relationships with businesses at all. Guess our copy is misleading somewhere?
Ah yes another shot at the kind of people vulnerable to the "organizations aligning themselves around a detached yet critically objective outsider while enabling them with their expertise and ideas and crediting them with the outcome, no hard skills required, just your own innate passion and curiosity !" fantasy.
This reads as coming from the disgruntled perspective of a 'turtle' who resents the strong opinions of 'rabbits' and the lack of experimentalism of 'birds'. Little consideration is given to the value of the other animals except as an inferior contrast to the turtles. An optimal solution would not be a 'Turtleocracy' (tyranny of turtles) but a balanced ecosystem where different strengths are given their due, and no group has tyranny over another.
> Most organizations should not be turtleocracies. It depends on what your organization wants to do, and whether it's never been done before.
> 1. When you must do things well, in the standard way, you need experts. You can put them together into an expert bureaucracy, a consultancy, etc.
> 2. When most things can go poorly, but you hope some things work out, you can use people with ideas and energy without needing turtles. You can put them together into a do-ocracy or startup ecosystem.
> 3. But, when you must do things well, in a way that's never been done before, you need "takeless" people, without strong ideas, who will slowly experiment over years. You can put them together into a Turtleocracy.
Why do we have to zoomorphize concepts like this? Scrum had it, with the chickens and pigs. To me, it just muddies the understanding of the thing, because you have to remember some story or joke about the origin of the specific zoomorphization. It's also really hard to get people to take the process seriously when the process treats itself like a children's story.
Everything is a metaphor, you probably prefer inanimate metaphors (like channels, pipes, scripts, keys, libraries, etc.) But metaphors involving animals being considered more childish and less serious is purely due to your cultural milieu.
This model doesn't seem too far removed from academia; at least in the "ideal" sense, ignoring the realities of attracting funding and academic politics. The turtle would go from PhD student to tenured professors; rabbits might be undergrads or non-academic faculty staff; birds might be people like librarians and lab techs.
I don't think that even works in the ideal -- academics in my experience are something like 45% rabbits and 45% birds, with a small cadre of turtles who manage to survive the politics and bs of academia because their research output is just so strong.
What even is this? Why does it seem to lead to a paid $2000 course? [0] What is the goal, and who is involved? It seems very high minded and deep on the surface, but what are the expected outcomes and timelines of this, system?
This work was started by Joe Edelman, whose been a part of some of the efforts to help people working in different domains design things with less toxic/addictive aspects (e.g. tech, social networking companies). He arguably prototyped and called for action now being done from bigcos in their “digital wellbeing” and “screen time” efforts.
See http://nxhx.org , try reading some of his earlier essays.
It's also called "management consulting." An article was on the top of HN the other day where the George Washington University was getting some, and apparently in that case the top decision-makers were treated to Disneyland Resort. What is this group offering compared to that?
On the surface it sounds like they are offering access to a network of connected and wealthy individuals with a hint that you might get paid to do research on one of their questions.
I'm not sure where people are getting the consultingware idea. We don't have any consulting relationships with businesses at all. Guess our copy is misleading somewhere?
I love notion as a tool but it seems like one of those things people will be crying about in a few years if we continue to put all this valuable information solely in their hands. (yes i know you can export but it doesn't preserve the awesome format they have which is really the point)
Really? Browsing through this site a bit completely turned me off Notion... like, the page is so slow to load, as if the rendering was happening on the client side, not the server side... Can't they just generate & cache the HTML and serve it?
Edit: they also hijack Ctrl-click which I consider extra shitty and non-user-friendly.
I agree the web interface is absolutely horrible. I use the desktop app. They allow you to export html from there and preserve the nested document structure (the main feature imo). I've seen writeups about people building nocode apps on notion so I think their idea might be to create an ecosystem where they can ignore respected conventions.
These mental models can be an interesting perspective, but please take them with a grain of salt. The more branding, marketing, cute names, and emojies applied to a mental model, the more you should be suspicious.
This "Turtleocracy" model might help bring some insight or inspiration in certain challenging environments, but be careful about assuming you're in a "Turtleocracy" or stereotyping people into "Rabbit" or "Bird". It's tempting to reach for these systems and stereotypes when you're in conflict with someone because it gives you a sense of having the upper hand. Ironically, doing so will turn you into the very person this article warns about in the section about Tyranny of People with "Takes". Always be on the look out for signs that you're wrong or that you've misunderstood the situation.
In my experience, it's healthy to have a variety of different models and perspectives through which you can view situations. It's not healthy, however, to try to force every situation to fit your favorite mental model. When you all have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Don't be that guy.
Yes, for sure. This is a known weakness, mentioned on the page. We hope to test ways to make turtleocracy robust against sociopathic conspiracies and fake turtles over the next year.
To continue with the example, many times turtles when slowly crossing the highway of innovation get run over by the trucks of disruption that they did not see when they started to cross the highway.
Now we finally have an organizational philosophy centered around listless bureaucrats.
Actually, we already have a lot of those. Highly conservative organizations that ascribe a very low probability of success to any particular effort are common and arise on their own without any coaching required. All it takes is a few failed projects in the professional history of the leaders, whether at that organization or elsewhere. Unless your leadership is full of 20-somethings who have never seen an idea not work out, a far more important problem is avoiding the scenario where nobody wants to takes risks because the benefits go to the company but the failure would be pinned on them.
A bit off topic, but is there a name for this trend to put emoji everywhere? I have some trouble to read like that. There is a kind of Madeleine de Proust though, it feel like children book: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8c/d1/e5/8cd1e583de4c89bf09c4275b2...
Slightly contrary to other commenters, but I like this trend (in web writing/Twitter etc.). A well placed emoji can convey an emotional state or complex concept that would otherwise take an extra sentence to convey.
I don't know if there's a term for it - but I was under the impression it's sole purpose was for marketers to create content that read/felt like it was written by "your friend". Lays on some heavy cringe-worthy "fellow kids" type of vibes.
I'd include it with the general infantilization of culture that has been going on for at least 20 years. It's not a coincidence that it reminds you of a children's book...
I think it's a marketing trend. The emojis seem like a soft universal language to help people who don't speak English grok broken google translations.
Hoping to hear the name for this trend as it's a very interesting one indeed. Done well it seems like this is definitely the new wave as we continue to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Done poorly, well I've done this and will just tell you the results are about as bad as you'd expect.
The language component hasn’t occurred to me, but suddenly makes sense. I once supported a customer for whom Google Translate wasn’t helping much, so we resorted to a combination of screenshots, boxes, arrows, and emojis and it ended well :)
However in most usages, there is no actual language benefit -- I doubt the animal emojis will actually help understanding of this article for any non-english speaker.
In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion.
Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.
Bummer you're being downvoted, though I don't totally agree with what you said - I think it makes sense.
I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right.
With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.
Really there's only one real usecase for emojis.. to add flair. ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻
They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence.
The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.
I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji
I'm not thinking of it as "fixed" so much as written languages do most other potential jobs better/clearer/faster than emojis. It's not sufficiently complex/composable enough to pose as a real challenger for expression.
Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it.
And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear
Tbh, the animal concepts here might work - not universally, but for people familiar with Aesop's fables (Turtle and Hare?), as the animals seem to carry the usual Western traits.
Emojis are just awful, because people assume that they convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible. You basically need a set of Rosetta Stones to decipher what the emojis in Twitter profiles are supposed to convey, and you have to first determine which culture you are looking at. Does the pine tree emoji mean weed, or does it mean perennial? Or the grandmother that sends around eggplant emojis when she is talking about parmigiana, completely oblivious to its other meanings...
> people assume that [emojis] convey universal meaning, but the minute you drill into different subcultures, you get into euphemism and subtext that renders them mutually unintelligible
This could be the great vowel shift of our era. In 100 years we might have dedicated phonemes for emoji, making a terse language similar to Chinese. Or as smartphones become ubiquitous and children are exposed to these graphemes earlier and earlier, we might skip vocalization altogether and just beam pictograms directly to the visual cortex via AR.
The idea that emojis will replace actual language reminds of Newspeak from 1984. A few hundred (or thousand) smiley faces can't replace the complexity of human emotions.
Berlin...divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, William Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Aleksandr Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce and Philip Warren Anderson).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox