1. What is the problem it’s trying to solve?

2. What are the resources available to address it?

3. How and how much will the proposed solution likely help?

4. What will be the cost, opportunity cost, and externalities?

Allowing one side of politics to get away with just shouting 1 at the top of their lungs while burying the other in questions about 2, 3, and 4 is breaking our democracies1.

Tell me if this sounds like familiar framing:

“While DOGE did not ultimately live up to its ambitious target of cutting $2 trillion in waste from the federal government, none can deny the $40 trillion deficit requires urgent action.”

Or what about this:

“New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Pied-a-Terre tax will not fix New York’s budget deficit, and may make that task more difficult by alienating property owners.”

For all the talk of liberals loving participation trophies, it is those on the right who have conditioned a largely supine media to award them gold stars for effort irrespective of performance.

Meanwhile, for all their talk of being too professorial, obsessed with details and boring, it is liberals who are henpecked endlessly over the minutia of plans as if the public yearns for econometric modelling.

Once I noticed this, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere.

• “While experts question RFK Jr’s rollout of a beef-tallow only school-meals program, liberals would be wise to concede he has a valid point about childhood obesity,” as if RFK is the first public health official to notice husky kids in US schools.

• “How are you going to pay for this?” is a question you’re apparently only allowed to ask progressives.

• Newspapers love nothing more than demonstrating their balance by finding one disgruntled retiree haunting the town square at 2pm on a Tuesday and presenting their weirdly specific and utterly parochial gripe about some policy initiative as if it were representative of an enraged vox populi taking to the barricades.

Tucker Carlson voice: What are we doing? What’s going on?

This doesn’t just apply in the US or to political leaders.

• When climate activists block a highway or throw something at a painting in the UK, the country is treated to 500 articles about whether this particular type of protest is the most operationally, tactically, and strategically optimal method of securing long-term policy change on environmental issues.

• When Bazza and the Restraining Order Lads attempt to burn asylum seekers and immigrants alive inside their accommodation, every article spends throat clearing paragraphs noting that of course they’re driven by serious and valid concerns about immigration (and not as basic observation would suggest, serious and valid amounts of cocaine).

I think this speaks to how the two sides of politics are expected to engage with the most passionate members of their coalition.

It is well understood that on both the left and the right there are activists who would like to see the government do things that fall outside the Overton Window. This is normal. It’s how an ideological spectrum will always work. Most countries are not prepared for the libertarian vision of completely privatizing all education, or the communist one of nationalizing every business larger than a lemonade stand2.

The difference is that it feels like the right is expected to act as an avatar for the primal wrath of their base, whereas the left is supposed to act as a check on theirs, policing not only the extent to which that base shapes policy but also how it speaks and presents itself.

• Right wing rage is treated as an elemental, reactive force that you get points for performatively appeasing - even if the method of that appeasement sows the seeds for greater anger in the future.

• Left wing rage is treated as a dangerous, destructive force that must be blunted at every opportunity lest the ideas it pushes somehow make the leap from random Twitch streamer to legislation - despite the chasm between those two being a million miles wide.

The rise of the Tea Party is treated as a cautionary tale for the left on the dangers of both annoying the right by winning an election and of allowing ‘extreme’ voices into the tent. Somehow though, it’s simultaneously treated as a manual for the right on how to ride the tiger to power and authority.

Ask anyone on the progressive left and they will tell you just how far their faction is from the reigns of power in any major western political party. Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t listen to Chapo Trap House. Andy Burnham isn’t standing shoulder to shoulder with Just Stop Oil on the M25. Anthony Albanese and Mike Carney are not out there building guillotines for bankers.

UK Labour had Jeremy Corbyn as its leader for a little while I guess, but that was for four years half a decade ago and he was subsequently thrown out of the party.

By contrast, the current leaders of major parties in the US, UK, Australia and Canada are respectively: Donald J. Trump, Kemi Badenoch, Angus Taylor and Pierre Poilievre. This is without going into how in at least the UK and Australia, 3rd parties even further to the right are making a play for power3. Draw your own conclusions.

Established wisdom seems to suggest that the way you deal with right wing activists is by performatively mollifying them, and the way you deal with left wing activists is by performatively telling them to fuck off.

The left is supposed to demonstrate its bipartisanship by reaching across the isle, moderating their views and angering its own base. The right is supposed to demonstrate toughness, determination and savvy by jamming through its every whim and pandering endlessly to the worst prejudices of its most extreme lunatics with increasingly less dog-exclusive whistles.

This is insane to me because most of the articles that demand we push back on progressive activists will concede, somewhere in paragraph 18, that they’re right on the merits. Climate change is urgent, pressing and deadly. Income inequality is bad. Discrimination and diversity of outcomes remains pernicious in everything from employment to law enforcement.

Meanwhile, that same paragraph 18 in a neighbouring article will concede that the right are wrong about surging immigration, wrong about immigrants being a net-drain on the system, wrong about immigration fueling crime and so on and so forth, but only after praising whatever draconian nonsense has just been proposed as ‘speaking to the legitimate anger and concerns’.

I think we have to push for consistency. To demand it, over and over again, at the top of our lungs.

Either the feelings of protesters are valid, irrespective of either the facts or the viability of their proposals, or they are not.

If the very existence of strong feelings among the electorate is enough, then let’s apply that broadly, to both sides. Stop demanding Gaza protesters provide a 47 stage plan for an inclusive middle-east peace or Occupy Wall Street explain how they’ll generate liquidity for short term government bond sales.

Likewise, if the formal political parties are responsible for every objectionable or confronting thing uttered by someone on their side of politics, regardless of actual influence or proximity to power, then let that be the rules for everyone. I bet I would sweat less reacting to Hasan Piker’s spicier takes than they would explaining away the latest verbal atrocity from Fuentes, Loomer and fucking Catturd.

This isn’t a case of whataboutism and it’s not an appeal to hypocrisy. We have a lot of revealed preference evidence that the latter has ceased to move any needles or stir any hearts. Rather, it’s a demand for equal treatment and grading without the curve.

Either we’re all adults or none of us are.

One of the tips I most frequently hear given to anyone heading into a job interview is to research the company and the role. This is excellent advice, but I worry it doesn’t really provide sufficient guidance on what to look for and how to relate it back to the questions you’re likely to be asked on the day.

I’m hoping the below offers some food for thought in that regard.

How to think about Interview Questions

One way to think about a job interview is that the potential employer has a range of hopes, fears and uncertainties about any potential hire, and the questions they ask are intended to create openings for you to tell stories that speak to them.

The exact same question can be born of very different priorities, and can be used to tell stories that speak to a whole range of different strengths you want to demonstrate. Consider this absolute classic of the interview genre:

“Tell us about a time you had to balance multiple competing priorities in the workplace?”

Depending on the story you tell, and the way you tell it, your answer here could emphasize your coolness under pressure, walk them through how you make decisions, demonstrate your judgement, show your independence (or inversely, your ability to adhere to a chain of command) and much more. The trick is knowing which.

For each answer you give, you ideally want to have clarity in your own mind regarding:

1. The specific messages you want the interviewer to come away with; and

2. What are all the messages you need to deliver throughout the interview to address the interviewer’s reservations and hopes about you in this role.

The first one is something you can practice. Clear communication and storytelling are skills, and skills can be honed or rehearsed. It comes really naturally to some more than others, and of course various disabilities can make it harder, but it’s something almost everyone can improve if they work at it.

Something like the STAR method can help you structure your delivery so you provide all the necessary context, position yourself in the story, highlight the actions that demonstrate your skills or character, and clearly indicate your results.

The second, knowing what beats you need to hit in an interview, is a matter of research, judgement, and strategic empathy, and it’s what I want to talk about today.

Strategic Empathy

Negotiators spend most of their time trying to work out what the other side wants, what it wants to avoid, and exactly how much they want both. Strategic Empathy is a shorthand way of describing a good faith attempt to see the world through your counterparty’s eyes to try to do that - and importantly to try and understand how they rank their fears and desires against one another.

Employers kind of work the same way. Hiring anyone to do anything is an investment of time, money and effort, as well as an acceptance of risk. It is taking a near stranger and trusting them with a role in a business, on a team or on a project. The employee’s performance may end up reflecting on the interviewer, their mistakes may be the interviewers to clean up, and their presence in the team may be something the interviewer has to endure.

Understanding what your interviewer is looking for specifically, and what they might be worried about, gives you a checklist for the things for the interview. You can’t walk out of that room without making sure you’ve spoken to them all exactly as much as you think they matter to them.

To keep things simple, I like to think about five broad (and poorly named) categories: skills, potential, safety, personality, and value.

Skills

For this role in particular, how meaningful is the difference between someone who is incredible at their work, and someone who is merely fine?

There are jobs that place an absolute premium on immediate, day one excellence. There are others where competence is sufficient provided it comes reliably and has the potential to be built on. Finally, there are some where if you don’t completely screw up, the world keeps turning and no one notices.

We all had to live through a bunch of television shows like House and Sherlock in the 2000’s premised on the idea that as long as your skills were high enough, you could be an unreliable, toxic jerk. In real life, that’s not how most good workplaces operate or what they hire for, but it illustrates a ‘skills first and skills only’ approach to hiring.

There’s a solid chance that if you’ve made it to the job interview, the people on the other side of the table are already reasonably convinced of your basic qualifications for the job. You’re in the room because they think you’re qualified, and beyond verifying that you seem to match the skills you claimed on your resume, their interest during the interview may well lie elsewhere.

Potential

Are you trainable, and are you a long-term investment?

The vast majority of graduate programs, apprenticeships, army recruitments and so on are less focused on how good you are on day one than they are on how good you could be.

If hiring for a position like that two key questions about any potential candidate are whether they’re capable of taking instruction, and to what extent they seem committed to the company, the sector and the field for the long term.

The last thing anyone wants is to hire into a graduate position someone too arrogant or fragile to accept mentoring, guidance and correction on their output. The second last thing anyone wants is to invest vast time, energy and resources in building someone up only to have them quit to join the seminary.

That’s not to say you need to give blood oaths of loyalty in your interview, or that you owe an employer that trains you eternal fealty. That’s not the point. The point is that if you’re going for a role like that, you should be aware that your interviewer is likely looking for signals you’re not popping your head in for a quick six months before flitting off.

Safety (Lack of Risk)

Are you a massive liability? How much damage could you do?

This does not always literally refer to physical safety, but is a more general category for fears the employer might have and their level of perceived risk.

Some employers will have a significantly greater risk appetite than others, and some roles are more sensitive to risk because of the nature of the work.

When I was sorting envelopes at night for a business services company, their risk concerns about me were very low because everything I did was low stakes, easily correctable. and I was far from interacting with actual clients.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was considerably more focused on risk when hiring me for a job that could involve handling highly classified information or speaking formally on behalf of the Australian government.

Many jobs are comparatively low risk overall, but have individual acute risks they’re particularly concerned about. A clerk at the bank probably isn’t going to bring down the financial system from their counter, but they are handling large amounts of cash daily, with meaningful consequences if they make mistakes or get sticky fingers.

If you are interviewing for a job where the stakes can be high, or where you think the employer thinks they can be (not always the same thing), a key thing you have to do through your answers is to provide them the confidence that you’re not someone they’ll need to worry about.

Personality

Will your co-workers and interlocutors want to kill you?

The more your role requires routinely engaging with your co-workers or being in close proximity to them for extended periods of time, the more a smart employer will want to know how irritating and abrasive you are in the workplace.

Now, I want to be very clear this is not about the kind of performative personality you might put on in short bursts as part of your direct responsibilities. Many roles require you to be personable or charming professionally. Bill Cosby was so famously affable on camera that people called him “America’s Dad”. Off screen, it turns out not so much. I’m sure you can think of your own examples.

There are some jobs where this kind of thing just doesn’t matter all that much. If you are the solitary night watchman at a warehouse in the industrial district and you’re kind of a jerk, your employer probably won’t even notice. This is not the case if you’re an arctic researcher three other scientists are going to spend four months stuck in a small camp with.

“Am I going to dread every encounter with you, and are you going to be an endless source of drama and tension in the office?” is a question many interviewers will have at the back of their mind throughout the entire interview, and something both your words and general demeanor can help reassure them about.

Value

Can I afford you and will you be worth the money?

The extent to which price is a variable at all will vary wildly from position to position and interview to interview.

Many jobs these days (very annoyingly) do not publish even a salary range, and don’t allow interviewers to disclose it until during or even after (!) the final interview. In that scenario, the interviewer will sometimes spend half the conversation wondering if you’re going to laugh in their face when they finally disclose the remuneration.

Other interviews may be for roles or projects where the potential employer is not certain paying anyone externally is actually a good financial move. In other words, whether to go ahead with the project at all. In which case they’re looking to discover what value-add you’ll bring as an external hire over their doing it themselves, tasking it out internally, or just ignoring the problem.

Here, you’re either looking to place yourself within the context of a broader market to explain your likely desired remuneration, or painting a picture of the return on the meaningfully greater return on investment paying you would deliver.

Nice Categories Nerd, Now What?

That’s valid. Rude, but valid.

The categories are there to help you think through what the interviewer will definitely need to hear from you at some point, and what might not need as much emphasis.

You’re trying to mentally create a map that looks something like this (very much contrived and illustrative example):

Imagine you’re interviewing to be the last minute substitute babysitter for a couple whose usual sitter has cancelled on short notice on their anniversary.

What do they care about?

• Your skills should be adequate, but it’s just one night. They don’t need Mary Poppins. As long as the kids are still alive and not addicted to meth by the end of the night, that’s a win as far they’re concerned.

• Likewise, they don’t care about your long term potential to forge a relationship with their kid and learn the specific ways they like to do things. Your potential gig here is for three hours on one night. They might like to hire you again in the future, but that’s not what’s going to drive their hiring decision tonight.

• They’re about to trust their child to a stranger, so their number one concern is obviously how safe and reliable you are. Will you actually turn up? Will you actually watch their kid? Will you steal their TV?

• Your personality and value are kind of tertiary here. They’d prefer you be easy to deal with and not too expensive, but they’re desperate and only looking for a short term hire, so they’re probably willing to pay a bit more and may be willing to tolerate a more abrasive phone manner than they would in someone they would subsequently have to pay and deal with for months on end.

Given the above, a reasonable assumption if you’re interviewing for this role is that your number one goal is to put to rest any concerns they have about your reliability and safety. You want to come off as at least somewhat pleasant, demonstrate you know what you’re doing and that your prices aren’t insane, but their biggest question mark is over safety and reliability and so that’s the box you’ve got to help them tick.

If you misread the situation, focus on skills, and thus spend the entire time talking about your PhD in pedagogy and your 37 stage approach to teaching kids calculus, you’ll have spent it answering a question they barely care about while neglecting the one they do.

You can also imagine this chart would look very different if they were looking for a more permanent babysitter. For example, depending on their financial situation they might be a lot more sensitive to price. They may also be looking for you to take a more direct role in their child’s development, which might place a premium on skills or potential. Safety would remain important, but you couldn’t focus on it as exclusively as you could when interviewing for a more temporary gig becuase they’re looking for more than just a last-minute gap-fill to keep their kid alive for the duration of one dinner.

Ok, but how do I know?

The optimal mix of areas to focus and emphasize will depend on three things:

1. The specific role you’re applying for;

2. The organization you’re applying at; and

3. The person or people interviewing you.

We’re going to ignore the third one. It’s really hard to get any kind of advance clue about (unless you happen to have inside information) and it’s kind of a learned skill. The only thing you can really do is have a reasonable supply of answers in your back pocket that let you say something about an area you thought they wouldn’t care about if it becomes clear from their body language or remarks that they actually do.

By contrast the first two (role and organization) are the ones where research is both feasible and wise. Here, the biggest mistake I see is folks who focus exclusively on the second one. They read all about a company, its mission, and its products or services… but they don’t spend some time thinking (in a structured way) about what the actual day job they’re being hired to do entails.

This is especially important for jobs that are a bit opaque or misunderstood from the outside, or where juniors and seniors do vastly different things. If I’m hiring you for a junior position at my law firm and you give me the impression you think you’ll be presenting oral arguments to the US Supreme Court in your first month, that’s a red flag.

A question we’d use when hiring for roles at Foreign Affairs was, “what is the role of the department in making Australia’s foreign policy?” We were weeding out the people who thought civil servants setting policy and who thus fundementally misunderstood what their job would be once they got in.

One of the strongest and most positive signals you can send to an interviewer is giving them the confidence that you’ve thought about the problem they’re hiring you to address, have a clear vision of what you’d be doing all day, and can speak confidently to both.

The nature of the work, combined with the nature of the company, should give you a pretty good intuitive sense of what they’re likely to be focused on from among that list of five categories. That lets you put together a strategy, and pick the stories you want to make sure you tell in the interview.

Of course, if it becomes clear from the way the interview is going that you’ve missed your guess, some adjusting on the fly may be necessary but it’s much better to have a plan and abandon it than to have no plan at all.

Think about the common interview questions everyone asks, think about your own experiences, and think about how to turn those experiences into stories that speak to those questions in ways that tick the boxes your interviewer needs ticked.

Hopefully some of the above has been helpful in helping you put some more meat on the bones of that age old advice ‘research the company you’re applying for’

If you have found it useful, do let me know in the comments below and I’ll do more of this kind of thing… otherwise, it’s back to enraged woke-posting.

Something this latest episode made me think about therefore, in addition to throwing my phone in a lake, is how we’re constantly mixing terms and concepts in this discussion - especially around the difference between ‘censorship’, ‘platforms’, ‘stages’ and ‘online yelling’.

I have a strong suspicion that the way we’ve blended all these things in our minds has let some pretty bad actors sell their consequences as martyrdom and a re-evaluation of their value as persecution. Not on my watch!

If you’ll permit me therefore, I’d like to break down how I think about ‘cancellation’ and the various forms or levels it can take - starting from the scariest and working my way down:

Level 4: Being Censorsed by the Government

The government has intervened to punish me for my speech or prevent me speaking in the future.

I can think of no society where there is an absolute and unqualified right to say literally anything you want without legal consequences. If I am calling for someone to murder the President or reading out the names of undercover intelligence operatives on my YouTube channel, most governments are going to have something to say about it.

The exact standard for when a government should intervene, and when it should be allowed to intervene, is a hotly contested political topic in many free societies.

First, because governments tend to have a monopoly on legitimate uses of coercive force and thus can ‘cancel’ you harder than just about anyone else.

Second, because being able to shut down speech it deems dangerous creates a pretty strong temptation for a government to decide that strident criticism, embarrassing reporting, or just particularly biting satire is ‘dangerous’.

In the vast majority of cases, this is not what we’re discussing (though I note the Trump DoJ is working on it and there’s also an increasingly worrying trend of the government applying pressure on platform and stage operators, which is also deeply troubling).

Level 3: Being Deplatformed

I have been denied or lost access to a platform, which is supposed to be open to just about everyone.

A comparatively new phenomenon in the age of the internet is that of the ‘platform’. This is a place where anyone is free to put their content out into the world via spaces that are managed by others, but not meaningfully curated.

I can open my YouTube account right now and upload a video ranting about how trees are a conspiracy by Greenpeace to shut down the awning industry, and YouTube would happily host it. We recognize that in doing so YouTube and Alphabet would not be suggesting that my video is good, or correct - merely that it doesn’t cross their few red lines.

Different companies and platform hosts individually set their level of censoriousness. You are allowed to do and say things on the streaming platform Kick that you are not allowed to on Twitch. Tumblr used to allow explicit content and then changed its mind. The theory that TikTok censors or buries content explicitly talking about murder led a whole generation to start saying “unalived” in place of death related verbs - something for which I would like to see the CEO of TikTok do some jail time.

The role of platform hosts and operators in free speech is a fascinating topic, especially in places like Twitter, TikTok and Facebook where an algorithm curates what is served to you and how often.

It is, however, not what we are talking about 98% of the time when we hear whining about cancel culture and deplatforming. The multi-month period during which Elon Musk got sick of Ukraine and algorithmically buried every reference to it on Twitter was bad, but I don’t recall Toby Young chaining himself to a Tesla over it.

If Dave Chappelle or Louis C.K. had uploaded a self-produced comedy special to YouTube at the height of their respective ‘cancellations’, I do not think YouTube would have refused to host it or buried it algorithmically. Their complaints, like those of Calipers Cofnas, were about losing stages, not platforms.

Level 2: Losing a Prestigious Stage

I have been denied or lost access to a prestigious stage or affiliation, which purports to be discerning.

The New York Philharmonic, Oxford University and Netflix are stages, because they are at least theoretically discerning about whom they invite to stand beneath their branding. Ok, maybe not Netflix but you get what I’m trying to say.

YouTube says everyone is entitled to make and host videos, but reserves the right to withdraw that right if it finds your content sufficiently objectionable. There is no similar automatic entitlement to playing for the Indiana Fever, writing columns for the Washington Post, or undertaking postdoctoral research at Ghent University.

The New York Times editorial board may not agree with every word Bret Stephens writes, but by giving him an opinion column (over millions of other people) they are endorsing him as a serious thinker whose words are worth considering. That’s a choice and a lending of institutional weight, in a way that YouTube publishing your video after a brief scan for copyrighted music is not.

Many of the complaints about ‘deplatforming’ fall into this category, not those above. Being suspended from your university, losing your Netflix special, being written out as the villain of the next Avengers movie, or losing your sponsors and endorsements are all examples of losing stages - not platforms.

The decision of whether to give someone a stage, or whether to take it away, is inherently going to be subjective and open to debate. Human beings are making these decisions under immense pressure. They are fallible, prone to panic, easily irrational, and open to being influenced or coerced. However, it is simply bizarre to suggest that nothing you say or do publicly could ever warrant an institution denying you their stage or reconsidering their decision to give you one.

People talk about an institution like Harvard withdrawing a speaking invitation as if it were shutting access to the marketplace of ideas. Except Harvard isn’t the marketplace. YouTube is the marketplace, and you’re welcome to set up your stall there and hawk your wares. Harvard is supposed to be Neiman Marcus or Harrods. You have to earn a place on their shelves because their customers trust them to curate quality. If they discover the shoes you’re selling leak in the winter and hate black people all year round, they’re perfectly entitled to kick you out of their collection.

Level 1: People are Free Speeching You Too Hard

I got yelled at online.

I don’t want to be completely dismissive of this one because having been on the receiving end of it, it doesn’t feel great. With that said, it’s really not a free speech issue and it’s not clear how you could do anything about it without curtailing the free speech of others.

A lot of the Telegraph columnists who constantly whine about cancel culture fall firmly in this category. They have a platform, they have a stage, and they are not punished by the government, but people online are mean to them when they say things.

Ricky Gervais and the too-edgy-for-ya comedy folks fall into this category too. They are for the most part welcome on just about any platform, frequently invited on stages other comedians can only dream of, and are not in the government’s crosshairs - but people online yell about them, in some cases calling for a loss of stage or platform.

A complicating factor here is that the decision to deplatform, withdraw a stage or even censor, is made by people who live in the world and are thus not immune to public pressure or bandwagoning. Certainly if enough people are talking about it online, writing angry letters, talking to journalists and so on, an invitation or offer of employment might be reconsidered.

We should be sceptical and scathing of organizations whose decisions at such times are driven exclusively by the wrath of the online mob and do not appear to have internal logic or justification. I’m sure this happened in the past and there are anecdotal examples, but I don’t think this is the case all that often. It certainly doesn’t appear true regarding Cofnas.

Words, Words, Dear Boy

The reason I have just tortured you with 1,400 words about words, is that many of the whiniest people on earth have taken to exploiting the lack of precision in how we talk about ‘cancellation’ to upsell what’s happening to them.

They weaponize our natural reluctance to see free speech silenced in service of bludgeoning their way onto or clinging to stages that confer them an institutional imprimatur their character and ideas do not warrant.

So let’s be very precise about where they can go, and where they can shove it when they get there.

Your milleage may vary.

I Too Am Annoyable

At about the mid-point of my time at the Australian Mission to the World Trade Organization, the ministry mandated that we all complete a workplace health and safety e-learning module.

Now, I want to be very clear, this was not survival training in case Jason Bourne is loose in our consulate and the Embassy Marines we don’t have must hunt him down.

While diplomats on more dangerous postings do some hair-raising things and are trained accordingly, my job was sitting in chairs at the office, sitting in other chairs at the WTO, and every so often standing around making chit-chat while eating hors d’oeuvres. Forgetting to take the toothpick out of a mini-burger before biting was probably my biggest weekly risk.

You can therefore imagine the collective surprise of my colleagues and I when, after avoiding doing this training for as long as humanly possible we finally sat down to do it and discovered that:

• The ‘learning’ part of the module took about 90 minutes to complete;

• The ‘exam’ at the end was absolutely impossible; and

• If you scored less than ~80% on said impossible exam you had to restart the entire learning module.

The whole floor failed. The exam was full of a randomized pool of questions in the signature 2010’s-era e-learning style:

“There is a fire in the building! What must you not forget to leave behind third, unless Venus is in retrograde?”

a) The Minister’s daughter;
b) Your sense of dignity and self-worth;
c) The nuclear launch codes; or
d) All of the above except the one that doesn’t apply.

When you failed, and again everyone failed, it would not tell you what you got wrong - simply that you didn’t score high enough. You would then have to go back to spending 90 minutes clicking through poorly formatted slides about eye strain and not getting a chill from air conditioning.

This sounds like I’m exaggerating, and I am, but let me assure you not by much. Eventually I grew frustrated and actively cheated, using a second computer to turn the test open book by having a separate instance of the learning open beside me as I attempted the exam. I still failed.

Eventually we all collectively said we were giving up and going back to our real jobs, and if human resources back in Canberra had an issue with that they could fly out and say so to our faces, where we would proceed to show them what a real workplace health and safety risk looks like..

We later learned the team who designed this e-learning won a prize for it.

Which Brings Us To Woke

I was thinking about this little episode when I read the renewed debate over the legacy of Woke 1.0. This is a topic I have many thoughts on, but I want to focus on something specific: human resources and Woke.

The argument here runs something like this:
The vast majority of people weren’t on Twitter to see semantic debates and were unlikely to be themselves cancelled. However, for many of the white working-class professionals who disproportionately shape our discourse and politics, HR initiatives at work brought the most annoying aspects home in ways that radicalized them against progressive policy in a way that the more abstract and ‘other-targeted’ horrors of conservative policy did and do not.

The first and most obvious reaction here is to get very angry at the type of person who finds having to sit through a bad two hour seminar on unconscious bias more determinative of their politics than <waves hands> all the things. I share that reaction but am very deliberately parking that.

Instead, I want to talk about why so much of HR training was so annoying and why blaming “Woke 1.0” for it is lazy and inaccurate.

In the Wokeplace

When it comes to the workplace I would summarize Woke’s arguments like this:

1. Even if most overtly and specifically discriminatory laws are gone, various forms of bias, including unconscious and institutional bias, are working against minority groups.

2. Many traditional workplace norms around behaviour, dress, communication and so on were designed around a certain kind of worker and can make the office/worksite unwelcoming or uncomfortable for others.

I suspect if you’re reading this far you probably agree with the above diagnoses at least somewhat. I certainly do.

Here’s the thing though: These are immense, difficult, structural, foundational, generational problems to fix.

We are talking about shaping the behaviour of millions of people, many of them very senior - behaviour which may be unconscious or driven by prejudices ingrained over decades.

Moreover, in many cases you’re trying to alter the behaviour of people in ways that can seem contrary to their immediate self-interest, and doing so based on the premise that they are (perhaps unconsciously) behaving in some pretty shameful ways.

“You’re a racist and you need to alter your behaviour so that you’re competing with five times as many talented people for your next promotion,” is just never going to be an easy sell - and large organizations charged the same people who commissioned our ‘how to sit in a chair’ e-learning with delivering it.

Think about the steps here:

1. There’s a major outcry about social justice of various forms online;

2. Senior executives and boards decide they can’t ignore it. Some, presumably because they see the moral imperative - but many others cynically and for fear of being called out online in ways that hurt brand reputation, staff retention, responsible investor interest, or that invite government regulation;

3. They task HR departments, most of which are not equipped for the task of “re-engineer society to be just” with developing, rolling out and managing a set of internal policies;

4. Deeply annoying mandatory seminars.

Senior leaders, many of them not seriously bought into the premise, ordered a largely underqualified (for this task) and underresourced group of people with other responsibilities to impose a top-down set of programs designed to challenge the learned behaviour of staff and alter it in some pretty foundational ways… and then didn’t really have their backs.

Let’s Talk HR

In most organizations, human resources departments sit at medium tier seniority at most. Any serious attempt at implementing the goals of Woke 1.0 inevitably puts them into conflict with individuals, teams, and at times the corporate mission or bottom line.

You know what I’m talking about:

• The biggest earner on the sales team keeps propositioning interns, but it’s all just in good fun and we have a quarterly target to hit;

• The Board of Directors is entirely old white guys, but they’re the ones who happen to have inside tracks on government contracts! We can’t hamstring our bids;

• The broken women’s bathroom would cost a lot to fix, and surely they can just take the elevator four floors up and use the other one;

• Sure, Jake’s super racist but he refuses to change and if we fired him over that now we’d have to explain why we kept him on for so long. Let’s just wait until he retires in three years.

None of these would be impossible to overcome if HR were qualified and empowered to do the right thing regardless of its impact, and if leadership had their backs. I just don’t think that’s how it went down.

To make matters worse, we then turned the entire thing into a culture war. “Woke is making you sit through nine hours of mandatory HR training on pronouns and how to pronounce Latinx” became the sort of thing people just accepted as true even when their own experiences of it were much more limited. Moreover, in spite of everything I’ve written above, they blamed some combination of Woke and HR instead of the senior leadership teams that tried to half-heartedly speedrun social justice for optics.

That made it much harder to have any kind of discussion about how to do this stuff better because the battle-lines were already drawn around whether to do it at all. The nuance was stripped out to the point where you either accepted that HR training sucks because woke was a terrible idea, or reflexively defended it because the alternative was to give up on social justice at work entirely.

Millenial Trade Nerd And A Mini-Rant

This was almost certainly compounded by the fact that HR is “female coded”, and of course everything is gender now. A lot of the reaction to the “Gen Z Boss and a Mini” viral video actually just assumes or pretends they’re all in HR. Check out the comments. This despite the fact that they actually work at a skin care startup in Australia which may not even have a formalized HR department, let alone one with a staff of half a dozen. Everyone just saw a group of women doing a dance and projected their frustrations with HR onto them.

Once again we have a situation where “Mom” has to implement one of “Dad’s” barely thought out ideas on something he winkingly whispers ‘isn’t really a problem but she keeps whining about it’, without his support or resources, and we all get very angry with her while letting him off the hook. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Final Thoughts

None of this is to say that HR is blameless or that HR is never annoying. It obviously can be. So can accounting, IT and legal - and no one dismisses the underlying merits of bookkeeping, computers, or compliance. The difference is in this case, senior leaders were cynically demanding this particular department to do quickly, top-down, and without resources a heavily politicised and poorly defined and frequently confronting task of staggering complexity.

Then, bad actors weaponized the often annoying results as evidence against social justice, while hyper-savvy reactionary centrists lectured us on how we should drop the whole thing to win suburban voters in Ohio or Bristol.

I don’t think that’s the right answer, but then I also failed an e-learning on how to safely sit in a chair - so what do I know?

I may never have anything to say again or I may be back soon with more non-trade thoughts.

I do not know what an institution is supposed to do when the bad faith monsters who dig relentlessly for gotchas claim to have found something real.

Except, that’s not true.

I know what they should do. I’m just infuriated by how snookered those of us not on the grifter-right are by situations like this.

• If we treat every allegation as credible we create incentives for terrible people to bury us in them, paralysing us with investigations the results of which will be weaponized regardless of outcome as either ‘gotchas’ or ‘conspiracies’.

• If we give a right wing outrage oxygen, the fire behind it grows, often vastly out of proportion to any alleged wrongdoing - and with consequences far beyond the formal.

• Yet if we ignore the hints of smoke and do not ever search for fire, we sacrifice doing what’s right for the sake of the broader culture war and give up our own integrity and that of our institutions.

• I suppose the answer could be that we must exist as Caesar’s wife, above reproach, but the world is vast and full of potential targets, full of humans, and full of sins.

The right has a massive, well-funded, internally incentivized ecosystem to fuel its argument by anecdote. It’s an established, monetized pipeline running from fringe TikTok creators, to major ones, to blogs and columns, to Fox News et al, to clips on Facebook and then back to Tiktok.

When that jaundiced Eye of Sauron focuses on an institution, I understand why it is natural to circle the wagons - especially around the vulnerable people whose lives that scrutiny is sure to ruin.

It is immediately obvious that even if there is an underlying truth to a given set of allegations, they are not being made in good faith, but as yet another sortie in a relentless campaign of attrition against institutions and all social progress. I just don’t know what to do about that.

I can also understand why, when dealing with people who argue almost exclusively via anecdote, it can seem justifiable to instinctively resist conceding the anecdote.

If you know that a massive, organized and well-funded machine is going to argue that a problematic black professional in a position of authority proves that no black professionals should be in positions of authority, I understand why you’d want to avoid conceding that black professional was problematic. It’s not like the subsequent moves in this chess game are hard to predict.

There are numerous examples of this. It sometimes felt like we had to defend horrifically implemented, poorly conceived, cynically mandated diversity and inclusivity schemes in large corporations - not because we thought they were perfect, but because we knew the other side was waiting for the slightest admission of imperfection to declare the entire project inherently flawed and return to all white c-suites and calling coworkers “sugartits”.

Progressives, liberals, institutionalists, and just decent people are constantly put in a position where we are expected to simultaneously play the culture war game like savvy operators and operate as if we are above or unaware of it.

Obviously, obviously, the overwhelming majority of Telegraph columnists writing about Prof. Arday or the millions of right wing chuds tweeting about him, don’t actually care about plagiarism in sociology PhDs, any more than they care about what the (precisely zero) trans players in the WNBA are doing to women’s basketball or whether the mayor of New York City has pronouns in his bio.

We are somehow expected to operate as if that’s not important, soberly considering each allegation on its merits and then doing the right thing, and then scolded as naive children getting outplayed by savvy operators when our doing what’s right isn’t reciprocated and is indeed weaponized against us as a gotcha.

We are treated as if we have independent and isolated agency whereas the people we are fighting with for the soul of our society get to be treated as purely reactionary forces.

Conservatives are given endless column inches to explain how they found the left so annoying they had no choice but to give up on all their stated principles and embrace some of the worst actors in political life. Well, Nathan Cofnas seems really annoying, but no one will permit us to say he was so irritating Cambridge had no choice.

Moreover, conservatives are permitted to explain away their actions by reference to the “problem” they were trying to solve, whereas any progressive solution is pilloried for the slightest externality or simply for failing to immediately and comprehensively solve the massive issue it was targeted at.

Conservatives are given endless leeway to pivot conversations about the comical, farcical, brutal, dystopian, inhuman failures of their immigration enforcement measures to the friendlier ground of the “problem” they’re trying to solve. Well, racism and unconscious bias is a pretty big problem, is anyone going to let us pivot every conversation about not fact-checking Arday’s claims hard enough to that?

What’s most maddening about all this is that it’s not like lowering the bar for us is the answer. We shouldn’t get a pass on judgement and responsibility just because we’re fighting terrible people. We shouldn’t just be able to yell “I’m doing this for a good cause” to waive away all questions about the efficacy, ethics and impact of our policies and actions. I know that.

I’m slowly being driven insane by watching many of the very institutions we’re trying to defend create a playing field we can’t win on, and then tut-tutt us for being insufficiently savvy not to concede goals on it.

I don’t know what to do about this except to call it out, again and again.

To say that a public discourse which denounces one side of politics as flawed for failing to live up to its stated principles, and rewards the other for tactical brilliance when they fail to live up to theirs is not sustainable.

To say that we are creating the wrong incentives and allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the bad faith actions of the worst people in public life.

To say that we have to do better, or risk becoming a lot worse.

Rest in peace, Professor.