Over Saturated

Last week I mentioned I had another term to share – Task Saturation. I was clued into this term when I was reading a section of The Dichotomy of Leadership and an example of task saturation was given in the form of a story from a pre deployment training work up. During the story one of the SEALs became overwhelmed by the number of tasks that he needed to keep track of during the exercise.

I found the term most often related to pilots or piloting (one source written by a pilot, the other regarding piloting), which honestly makes sense seeing as you would have a lot to do while flying a plane. I think this quote from Eric Barfield sums up a neat definition, “Task saturation is having too much to do without enough time, tools or resources to do it.” Honestly though, task saturation can affect anyone really as we all so much we are doing on regular basis while getting peppered with distractions, phone calls, emails, various deadlines, et cetera … et cetera … et cetera.

Just because we get overwhelmed does not mean that everything is lost and the world is coming to an end. Organization, check lists, and offloading work will help relieve the stress and help bring order to the mental chaos. This list of steps from the Afterburner consulting or from Jocko himself will help bring sanity to the mental chaos.

Fear of Succeeding

Have a post today that is a little different than what I have written in the past. Several months ago I was frustrated about not making progress on many projects I had going on. I took a minute to consider the why of the situation and started to wonder if maybe the reason for the lack of progress was because more that I did not want to progress, did not want to succeed, and was sabotaging myself. Why not succeed? Maybe it was a fear of success? Is it possible to be afraid of success?

Turns out, there is such a thing as being afraid of success and is defined as – “Fear of success is the concern that once we achieve something new, we’ll be incapable of sustaining it or may suffer because of it. (https://www.betterup.com/blog/fear-of-success)” Well, this definition makes the condition more real and makes my thought on the topic feel like a real possibility. Reading more, a few more examples that back up the definition “Success may not be all it’s cracked up to be, Success might change you, but not for the better, or You might get extra attention, but you’re shy or introverted and uncomfortable with the spotlight.(https://www.healthline.com/health/anxiety/fear-of-success)”

Well, this sounds familiar, I believe the thought that lead to this quick search was along the lines of “success means that everything will have to change and nothing will be like it is”. Of course things change, but that does not mean that it will be bad or that everything will be different. Come to think on it more, and looking back at it, I have had a lot of success – and not everything changes for the bad.

This post was a little different and shorter than usual, but I had a thought and ended up learning a new term I thought I would share. I have one more new term to share, a post for next week.

Intermission..

So, it has been a minute, I got sick a few weeks back (weather changes get me every year and tends to make me miserable for a month or two) and then got somewhat sidetracked by work stuff. I assure you dear reader, I was not completely avoiding my duty as blog type creator … just slacking… a little.

A few years back, I decided to make a go at making this site 100% professional, I had a different domain name and different content. I never could quite get it to land the way I wanted to thought and I pulled that domain and all under the FallingStuff umbrella … During my recent absence, I got to thinking about it and took some time to spin that name out from under the this main site to its own hosting. I really wanted to give some focus to the more education and knowledge I started creating here and felt like it would get lost in the noise that is memes and music and game stuff and whatever other weirdness that interested me. So, gotchtech.com was spun off to house that tutorial and focused content – the spot I reserved to share knowledge and wisdom I have gathered on the computer machines.

I have a boatload of topics that I can create posts about, so content to fill both of these two blogs on at least some kind of schedule should not be a problem. I find myself slightly behind on writing so I need to get caught up to keep in line with the goals I had wanted to meet this year, plus after splitting out the tutorial bits I feel more comfortable writing things that are more on the personal side, thoughts, feelings, etc. so that will be coming.

That is all I have for the moment, I am still in the process of gathering thoughts and organizing notes to get back on it after being distracted – more to come.

Don’t Give Give the Kill Bot the Life Begging Routines

I started this post right about the time this story dropped, but somehow it never made it to being posted. As I was going though to clear out drafts of posts that I did not finish (for whatever reason…) I ran across this gem to be shared. As a side note, in all the time since this was posted, there has not been a follow up. 

I saw an article the other day discussing an experiment about where participants worked with a robot to perform a list of tasks. Now working with the robot is not so odd, but the twist is that after the tasks were done the participants were asked to turn off the robot. The robot began to ask or beg not to be turned off, and a significant number of the participants would not turn the robot off.

Source: New study finds it’s harder to turn off a robot when it’s begging for its life – The Verge

What if there was a robot that was meant to kill instead of solve puzzles, say a “kill bot”. Now what if that code to “beg for its life” was added to the kill bot and it started a fight with a human. The human could get the advantage on the kill bot and while the human were ready to deliver the ending blow the kill bot begs for its life. If the results of this study were to scale then most humans would feel sympathy and not deliver the blow giving the bot the chance to turn the tables and kill the human instead.

The experiment reminds me a lot of the Milgram experiments in the 1960’s. Sure, bit of a stretch, but what if?

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