Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down

Interesting. The framework from the article mentions three independent axes (active&#x2F;passive, internal&#x2F;external, positive&#x2F;negative) but doesn&#x27;t explore all combinations of them. It seems like there are other clear actions that can be driven by those other combinations:<p>Active Positive External -- Leave (as per the article)<p>Passive Positive External -- (?)<p>Active Negative External -- Betray (trying to harm the organization by interacting with external entities or authorities)<p>Passive Negative External -- (?)<p>Active Positive Internal -- Voice (as per the article)<p>Passive Positive Internal -- Loyalty (as per the article)<p>Active Negative Internal -- Sabotage (trying to harm the organization via internal actions and interactions)<p>Passive Negative Internal -- Neglect (as per the article)<p>I&#x27;m not really sure how Passive Negative External or Passive Positive External would manifest. For negative, failure to protect against or warn about hostile external action? For Passive Positive External something like whistleblowing seems to mostly fit, but seems more active than passive.

“the people most sensitive to a decrease in quality are typically those with the most resources, skills, and talents that could be used to effectuate improvement. The people who are the least sensitive to quality usually have fewer resources, skills, and talents. When the people who have resources leave, it results in a “brain drain.” With fewer well-resourced members, the quality of the group further declines; it thus has even more trouble attracting new members (especially well-resourced ones); as a result, even more people leave. Things go from bad to worse, and the group or organization enters a death spiral that can be difficult or impossible to recover from.”<p>I wonder about this in the context of immigration reform.<p>If the US were to only allow those most capable of fixing their own state&#x2F;country to flee to the US, is this a moral policy when we have the knowledge that it extends the harm of a bad system in need of reform?<p>Those left behind are the most poor and incapable of helping themselves.

This is a very insightful article -- some of it seems so obvious but in that wonderful way when something is obvious _in hindsight_, ie is written with clarity and insight.<p>A better title would be &quot;Exit, Voice, Loyalty, or Neglect&quot;. The article focuses very little on burning things down.

This is a really good starting point for discussion, I like it a lot. It doesn&#x27;t quite capture all the nuances -- and I think Loyalty and Voice need some refinement.<p>My observation is that people often use their voice when they are invested and want a situation to work. You&#x27;ve worked at Acme Corp for seven years, most of the time it&#x27;s been good. You like your job and co-workers, but growth and management changes have taken a toll. So you start speaking up trying to make things better. That <i>is</i> loyalty. Loyalty isn&#x27;t passive acceptance or blind hope that things will get better if someone else makes changes.<p>What this calls &quot;loyalty&quot; I&#x27;d call apathy, inertia, or lack of agency. &quot;Things were good once, they will be again, so I can just wait it out.&quot;<p>And neglect isn&#x27;t the same thing as &quot;burn it down,&quot; IME. I&#x27;ve seen both. Maybe it needs a section on sabotage...<p>But, again, this is a great starting point for discussion. Might share this with some folks who don&#x27;t frequent HN...

Clickbait title. Nothing in this (pretty vapid) article refers to &#x27;burning it all down&#x27;; according to the article, a person leaves, complains, stays quiet and hopes for the best, or stays quiet and distances themselves from &#x27;it&#x27;. The piece is just an overly-wordy, high-level summary. It was bad enough that I ran it through a ChatGPT detector and the worst bits (affluent parents section) got picked up as AI-written.