John

“For managers, whose jobs often have less visible outputs, this may feel especially hard, but it is crucially important. Think about how you spend your time each day. Are you calling meetings because you relish those moments where everyone’s in the same space, or does each meeting have a specific goal? Are your meetings serving each employee, or are they simply the easiest way for you to download information? If the answer is that it primarily serves you, then chances are you are creating more work with tertiary, administrative tasks that you’re passing along to others. It’s not your fault. It’s part of a classic trap where performative work begets more performative work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the personal cost of believing is low and the personal reward of believing is high. Believing that 9/11 was a government plot or that Barack Obama was not born in America does us no personal harm, but it can help us feel enmeshed in a special group of insiders with privileged information. Experiments show that a good way to help people think more rigorously and accurately is to pay them to get the right answer; when they have skin in the game, the personal cost of being wrong goes up.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Black Americans recognize the necessity of standing in solidarity, but they also have a human desire to be distinct and unique. Racism attacks both. It exacerbates the need for unity while also reducing black people to a throng of carbon copies—it makes solidarity an existential imperative and mutes the individualism of each group member. The consequence is a group seen as homogenous by those on the outside looking in and as heterogeneous by those on the inside peering out, creating a destructive incongruence between how black citizens are viewed and how they view themselves.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth