Stephen Hawking Is Taking Legal Action Against Jeremy Hunt

[Seanm]

Let's cut to the chase here: a simple test. You discover you're using too much plastic A, so you talk to your staff - 1. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company” or 2. “OK folks, we're now using rather a lot of plastic A. Can we please make an effort to reduce wastage of this? Many thanks, it'll really help the company, and we'll give you 50% of the money saved”. So what do you think will work best? Simple behavioural science...

This is not encouraging...

 

[Suffolk Tony]

So what's your answer? Bear in mind my staff were professional clinicians, so hardly menial work. This is an actual example, not a theoretical one.

 

[Cav]

The point is, so far as I am concerned, is that selling public services to the private sector seems to result in increased cost and more inefficient service. I understand that Governments wants to be seen to reduce both capital costs but, more importantly, revenue costs but equally importantly reduce direct risk to that Government. The latter is particularly attractive: "my train service is subject to strikes, what is the Minister going to do about it?" Minister: "Nothing to do with with me."

 

[vuk]

So what's your answer? Bear in mind my staff were professional clinicians, so hardly menial work. This is an actual example, not a theoretical one.

so it's an actual example of a badly-conducted experiment? i'm not sure how you managed to evenly and randomly divide people into your 2 experimental conditions. can you explain that?

since you are open to experimentation, how about one in which your company is turned into a cooperative? (we would have to have several companies in the investigation to do it properly)

 

[Cav]

Mull, I sympathise with what has happened in your job, but that's not the NHS. I certainly didn't state that privatisation is the answer to everything, it's just one approach that can be valuable if properly implemented. There are many examples of excellent services within the NHS, some of which were originally tendered out to specialised private companies who sorted out badly-run and managed provision. The problem faced by these in-house services is that, given the squeeze on funding, they tend to get their budgets plundered by other larger and more crucial departments. I could give you lots of examples of this happening.

We'll never agree about the value of incentivising staff and companies with financial rewards. It does work...

Do you believe that NHS Trusts going bankrupt and being put into special measures is some improvement on how it used to be?

 

[Cav]

yes, you could test something like that, but you would have to break it down to (analyze by) specific tasks and have better/narrower scopes of your conditions, especially the non-financial one . your proposed "test" is actually not simple at all, but it can be split apart to a set of simple, testable principles, even within one experiment, if we had to.

that said, if you take condition B, the research that as already been carried out suggests that people carrying out the most menial work (physical labour) would perform best (in the direction you want) with financial incentive, but the rest would be hindered by it.

as for the vague "it will help the company" condition A, i'm not sure of the concept you are getting at -- identification with company, belief in company doing well equals job security, etc. -- too messy to be of scientific interest.

Vuk, can you, from your(claimed) educational achievements in Psychology, reference peer reveiwed studies that either prove or disprove the concept of incentives in the workplace?

 

[Suffolk Tony]

Do you believe that NHS Trusts going bankrupt and being put into special measures is some improvement on how it used to be?

Absolutely not, and I'm not sure how you could possibly make that assumption. Were NHS Trusts ever a good idea in the first place?

 

[Suffolk Tony]

so it's an actual example of a badly-conducted experiment? i'm not sure how you managed to evenly and randomly divide people into your 2 experimental conditions. can you explain that?

since you are open to experimentation, how about one in which your company is turned into a cooperative? (we would have to have several companies in the investigation to do it properly)

It was not an experiment. Do you know anything practical about managing people, or are you just theorising?

 

[vuk]

It was not an experiment. Do you know anything practical about managing people, or are you just theorising?

you are the one theorizing...

since it was not an experiment, you/we have no idea about the relative merits of this or that incentive from it. i am not contesting your anecdotal experiences or the validity/effectiveness of the decisions you make in your particular company, in your particular job. i waded in because you were attempting to generalize way, way beyond that. if you want to make those generalizations, you have to carry out experiments. other people have done that and things are a lot more complicated than what you suggest and there is evidence that the central idea (regarding monetary reward) is all backwards.

 

[Suffolk Tony]

Once more, you assume things about me, my experiences, and my educational backgound you know nothing about. Why not answer my question? It's as simple as I can make it. I'd be interested to learn what your management experiences are.

 

[vuk]

Once more, you assume things about me, my experiences, and my educational backgound you know nothing about. Why not answer my question? It's as simple as I can make it. I'd be interested to learn what your management experiences are.

i am not making any assumptions at all. in fact i am clearly extracting the ideas/facts and assessing them. i actually do have management experiences, but they are as irrelevant as yours because i never used them to conduct any experiments.

i am reminded of a remark a good friend of mine made, observing the MBA types who have big opinions on economics because they've been good at making money: it's like the very attractive, charismatic man who's sexually successful claiming how he really understands women.

p.s. what assumptions do you believe i am making about you that bother you so much? i truly have no idea.

 

[Suffolk Tony]

There you go again, deciding I'm an “MBA” type. Have I been good at making money? You seem to think so. Stop making totally unfounded assumptions about me.

 

[vuk]

There you go again, deciding I'm an “MBA” type. Have I been good at making money? You seem to think so. Stop making totally unfounded assumptions about me.

no, that's not what i think. i was just throwing in a humorous/loose analogy. you claim to have generalizable scientific knowledge of human behaviour and motivation because of personal experience as a manager. knowledge that runs counter to actual research. it's comparable to what the stereotypic MBA guy does.

(if anything, i should be complaining that you keep side-stepping what the real issue is and making assumptions about me making assumptions about you instead)

 

[Cav]

you are the one theorizing...

since it was not an experiment, you/we have no idea about the relative merits of this or that incentive from it. i am not contesting your anecdotal experiences or the validity/effectiveness of the decisions you make in your particular company, in your particular job. i waded in because you were attempting to generalize way, way beyond that. if you want to make those generalizations, you have to carry out experiments. other people have done that and things are a lot more complicated than what you suggest and there is evidence that the central idea (regarding monetary reward) is all backwards.

In fairness, Tony never said it was an experiment - that is another of your strawmen arguments which you seem to think he has to defend - he said it was his experience of motivating people. I have managed people and knew what worked for me, and them, in that particular situation.
I have asked before what peer reviewed learned studies you can bring to the table, in the absence of any evidence that you have actually managed a team, which we could dismiss as anecdote and therefore worthless.

 

[vuk]

back to the larger topic, privatization of the NHS, some of you may be interested in this assessment of how that has been working out in the american "experiment":

 

[Suffolk Tony]

This isn't America.

 

[vuk]

This isn't America.

MBA tony.

have you watched the interview? is there really nothing applicable in assessing the notion of privatized health care in general within a capitalist "democracy"? you really do seem to have a chip on your shoulder today.

 

[Fatmarley]

back to the larger topic, privatization of the NHS, some of you may be interested in this assessment of how that has been working out in the american "experiment":

It would be a different story If Suffolk Tony was In charge.

 

[DonQuixote99]

Getting past the big picture, I have endless questions about the 'overuse of plastic A' experience. But I won't bother asking any of them, except one: what was the relation of the 'use of plastic A' to the accomplishment of the unit's mission? Presumably plastic A was being "overused" because this was a way for individuals to accomplish things, and some of those things might well relate directly or indirectly to mission accomplishment. Putting an additional incentive, monetary, into the mix of existing incentives might well skew behavior toward plastic-A conservation, but one must wonder what other effects might result, and whether mission accomplishment would be optimized, or not. In short, might there be negative impacts from underuse of plastic A?

Incentives can have odd effects. You may know how the story of how incentivizing quantity lead to production of many small nails, while incentivizing weight lead to the production of few but very large nails. Desired optimization was missed both times.

All in all, incentives seem to me to be blunt tools used by managers who have no true insight into employee motivation. The incentive plan given here described no understanding of why the employees was using plastic A as they were.

 

[Suffolk Tony]

In answer to your question - no. I posed this as a much-simplified version of the actual situation, which no one seems prepared to answer. Neither did I state my position in this.

Fatmarley, I've no answer to the problems presented by the NHS, nor did I pretend I did. What do you think should happen?