Not everyone wants a better society, nor agrees on what a better society even looks like. It's a common mistake to believe your adversary is just like you, but terribly confused.
Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol
I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials.
But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry with ups and downs (including layoffs) for a decade or so now. Paid that debt off. Lived in a high CoL city in a nice apartment. Got a nice house after 5y of saving (but not being super frugal, just savvy I'd say. e.g. drove the same 08 Civic the whole time). And now we have a baby and only one of us works at all (and the other WFHs).
We didn't get giant donations from our parents (although some reasonable college savings helped, which I am repeating for my kid). Didn't go to prestigious fancy schools. Didn't even exceptionally excel in school.
But the key was to not throw our hands up and say the system is fucked. It's waxed and waned since that 08 crisis, and not participating is the main way to have lost. So yeah, thinking insanely wrong stuff like you need 10 mil to succeed is just stupid and self sabotaging haha.
what's wild is that it could be argued that this was in the shareholders' best interest as well, because it was in the best interest of the health of the company, but somehow that doesn't satisfy a "fiduciary duty"
When someone tells you "my hands are tied" it's always worth asking whether they made the rope
I have a simple guideline for real life interactions with others that carries over quite well on-line, "Deal with issues; ignore details."
It's amazing how well this works in person, especially when trying to get something done. My number one question to another is probably, "Is that an issue or a detail?" We can almost always decide together which it is. Then, if it's an issue, we deal with it, and if it's a detail, we move on to the next issue.
This has also saved me countless hours and aggravation on-line. If I post something and someone disagrees, I quickly decide whether or not it's really an issue and only engage the other if it is. I realize that this is just a judgment call, but I'd estimate about 90% of on-line disagreements are just details. In these cases, I think it's best to simply move on.
A Norwegian team looking into Long Covid ME/CFS formulated a quite good (but still somewhat flawed) questionnaire for quantifying functional disability that Post Exertional Mailaise (PEM) causes. Its called Funcap and there are two forms, 27 and 55 which are the number of questions. There is a publicly available SPA for this https://raffbenato.github.io/funcap55/ which will give you a good idea of the level of debilitation someone scoring 1 is dealing with.
Funcap maps fairly well to the mild,moderate, severe and very severe descriptions that have been historically used and its fairly precise and improvements of 0.5 are very measurable. Its not popular yet but it should be its probably the best functionality questionnaire.
In regards to linguistics there is a real issue with people who have never had a sensation understanding someone else describing it. ME/CFS is 4 symptoms and a few other groupings of them under the Canadian Consensus criteria but a lot of focus is put on fatigue and PEM. But the fatigue is not something someone who doesn't have the disease could understand. Its not tiredness like not sleeping enough, its somewhat more like the worst flu you ever had and made you want to stay in bed (which most people have not experienced) but its still underplaying the muscle weakness and lack of stamina and general feel of unwellness that encompasses this fatigue, its like all the cells in the body have no energy. There is simply no way to express this and have someone understand how debilitating that is and the consequences for breaching capacity, which make ME sufferers worse sometimes permanently. We just don't have the words or really the understanding because while many biological issues have been found nothing has yet been accepted as a biomarker of the condition.
Gabor Maté - a physician who worked with people with serious substance abuse disorders for many years - talks about how addiction is usually a symptom of some other underlying suffering; often trauma. The addictive behaviours act as a way to avoid confronting that pain.
That thrill is present in any creative endeavor. If you like tech and enjoy that thrill, yeah, work in tech. At the same time, if you are tired of tech and want that thrill, go make something else. I'm a collector of hobbies at this point, having at least dabbled (if not more) in woodworking, stone carving, jewelry making, furniture upholstery, fused glass, painting, drawing, sculpture, clothing design, and creating nature trails in our forest. They all give that thrill.
Tech pays better, though - so I work in tech to pay the bills, then spend the money on tools to get that creative thrill somewhere else.
LLMs make bad work— of any kind— look like plausibly good work. That’s why it is rational to automatically discount the products of anyone who has used AI.
I once had a member of my extended family who turned out to be a con artist. After she was caught, I cut off contact, saying I didn’t know her. She said “I am the same person you’ve known for ten years.” And I replied “I suppose so. And now I realized I have never known who that is, and that I never can know.”
We all assume the people in our lives are not actively trying to hurt us. When that trust breaks, it breaks hard.
No one who uses AI can claim “this is my work.” I don’t know that it is your work.
No one who uses AI can claim that it is good work, unless they thoroughly understand it, which they probably don’t.
A great many students of mine have claimed to have read and understand articles I have written, yet I discovered they didn’t. What if I were AI and they received my work and put their name on it as author? They’d be unable to explain, defend, or follow up on anything.
This kind of problem is not new to AI. But it has become ten times worse.
My twin always tells me (when I'm expressing sadness): "You need something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to."
It usually helps.
When I need more words to chew over, I re-read ViolentAcres' incredible post "Most People are Sad for a Reason" [1]. Thanks for my annual reminder.
>“I learned that I wasn’t sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad because my life sucked ... you should be wary of the Doctor who tells you a pill is a fix for your broken mind. The way I see it, you have a lot of reasons to be sad right now. So if that’s what you’re feeling, that seems about right to me.” —linked author's grandmother
The real threat of AI isn’t just that it might make human labor obsolete. The deeper danger is that it could strip away people’s sense of purpose-the feeling that what they do matters.
Joblessness is an economic issue.
And economies are human-made. We can redesign them.
Purposelessness is a human issue.
And if we don’t address that, no amount of UBI or retraining will fix the emptiness that follows.
This post argues that collapsing birth rates aren’t just about housing or money — they’re a rational response to the sense that the future is unstable, meaningless, or even dangerous. It introduces the concept of “temporal inflation” — the idea that just like money loses value in hyperinflation, time loses value when people can’t trust the future. Would love to hear if this resonates with others.
I think perhaps you default to trusting your local police, courts and judges to enforce a "hate speech" law clearly and consistently far more than I do, or at least enough to think they'll make a difference beyond merely having a law on the books as a form cultural virtue signaling. Based on my experiences, perhaps I distrust the competence of local and state police and courts too much. I sincerely doubt they have the skills to consistently interpret a hate speech law with enough nuance that it does much good (and, please, "Hitler did nothing wrong" isn't an instructive example. Where such laws fail is when things get a little more challenging like deciding if "Gaza is Genocide" or "Trans-Women Are Not Females" qualify as jailable hate speech). I fear that any such law, after the first dozen court cases and appeals, will boil down to a list of "23 Words and Phrases You Can't Say" or, in the other extreme, remain so broadly vague no one is quite sure what might get them arrested, leading to lots of local abuse and endless court cases which fund lawyer's golf club memberships for decades. While the 'broadly vague' option might actually trip up the occasional mini-tyrant who isn't quite careful enough, it'll also effectively silence many other speakers who merely fear the uncertainty and choose to self-censor (as has already been shown to occur under well-intentioned but misguided campus "speech codes" https://www.thefire.org/).
So that's what I trust less than I think you do. On the other hand, what I think I trust more than you do, is my fellow citizens. I was raised in a raucous, fractious, combative, Darwinian marketplace of ideas where everyone is assumed to be completely full of shit unless they can conclusively prove otherwise (and sometimes not even then) and no one gets any respect unless they earn it (which is also only... maybe). Do you remember the movie "Fight Club"? I grew up in a culture that's "Speech Club." The first rule of Speech Club is you don't go whining to Daddy government because someone said something wrong, naughty or mean. You stand up and hit them back with twice as much speech. You eviscerate their stupid arguments with facts and expose what a fucking moron they are in front of everyone. You don't silence them under threat of imprisonment. You beg them to please never stop being so fucking stupid because it's pure comedy gold and mama needs those sweet TikTok clicks. And that's where the trust comes in. While I disagree with my fellow citizens about many things and suspect maybe up to 10%-15% of them are idiots, I've also learned that, on average, most of the rest of them are pretty good at sorting better ideas from worse ideas and spotting nuggets of truth amidst a sea of bullshit. Sure, sometimes they get fooled or swayed by emotion for a minute but, when things get real, eventually they tend to be pretty decent people who don't want to do wrong by others or side with evil. That sense of trust in the underlying good faith and common sense of my average, aggregate fellow citizen is why I feel no need to silence bad, evil, hateful, wrong ideas. Those who strongly feel society must decide which words are too dangerous, too unsafe for "average citizens" to even hear for fear it will corrupt their weak minds, don't think much of their fellow citizens (and must think themselves well above average to assume the role of arbiter of ideas). That feels uncomfortably elitest. Acting afraid of bad ideas is also granting a lot of power to those words and ideas, instead of dismissing them as more random bullshit or just laughing at them when needed.
Finally, if certain ideas are so clearly wrong that speaking them out loud must be stopped by legal force, aren't they also clearly wrong enough for the average person to tell they are wrong? Why can you so easily determine they are wrong yet fear others can't? Logically, it seems the answer must be you know you are smarter than most other people. Or, perhaps you feel you are only average, and thus support allowing those with greater intellectual capacity than you to determine for you which ideas are "hate speech". If so, how will you feel when your intellectual superiors decide an idea is "hate speech" when you are quite sure it's merely controversial? Or, if choosing our collective arbiters of truth by IQ score is too problematic perhaps the only fair way is majority vote? I suspect this is why anyone arguing for "hate speech" laws uses "Hitler/Nazis" as an example, instead of something, you know, hard. The problem becomes clearer with something like "Trans-Women Are Not Female." That's definitely controversial but, depending on exact wording, more than a third of the population feel that's a valid topic reasonable people should be able to at least discuss BUT another (approximate) third are certain it's "hate speech" (note: personally, I have no strong opinion on this one at the moment). In other countries, the percentages swing to over 50% and, depending on which country, it can swing to a majority either way. How do we decide if it should be hate speech in tough, rapidly evolving situations? Should we make it legal or illegal country by country? Or should we ignore it because it's not a slam dunk like Hitler/Nazis? (Sorry trans-friends!) From definitions to enforcement to lack of meaningful impact to unintentional consequences to abuse of power, when I look at the idea of "hate speech" laws, I see nothing but good intentions in concept but thorny problems when put into practice across broad populations and over time.
All that said, you've articulated your points very well. I think I understand your point of view and the foundational assumptions behind it. I doubt we're going to suddenly find common ground, although not for lack of trying! We simply interpret the world through different assumptions based on different experiences and arrive at different conclusions. And further discussion probably won't be productive in changing either of our viewpoints. Fortunately, it's clear we both ultimately want to same thing, a fair and sustainable civil society with equal justice for all. Our differences are in what we choose to prioritize as the best way to achieve that goal. Hopefully, I've conveyed my viewpoint, reasoning and foundational assumptions well enough for you to at least see why I think about this the way I do (despite, obviously, not agreeing with all my assumptions). Not everyone who supports strong free speech rights is a closet Nazi sympathizer (I'm still hurt you went there... such a cheap shot! :-). For my part, I never thought your support for hate speech laws was unprincipled or less than well-intentioned. My goal wasn't to change your mind, just to plant a suspicion there might be a well-grounded position against hate speech laws which, although wrong in your view, is at least sincere, self-consistent and principled. I hope for both our sake that, as the future unfolds, hate speech laws are abused less than I fear and strong first amendment speech protections protect democracy better than you fear.
I don’t think it’s about trusting authority or not, it’s about how you construct a consistent model of the world and deal with conflicting bits of information.
There’s a willingness in some people to consider some grand conspiracy is lying for complex reasons without considering the possibility that the person talking about it is lying to you or just mistaken for mundane reasons. Perhaps the medical establishment lying to you, or it’s the guy trying to sell you healing crystals.
Other times it’s more subtle conflict such as the ‘healing power of touch’ vs ‘touch fulfilling a physiological need’ where it’s easy to exaggerate a subtle misunderstanding to a wildly inaccurate idea.
Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
> That’s when it dawned on me: we don’t have a vocabulary for this.
I'd like to highlight the words "counterfeiting" and "debasement", as vocabulary that could apply to the underlying cause of these interactions. To recycle an old comment [0]:
> Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses [of LLMs] is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight."
> Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge.
> In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
Knowing God, knowing Christ, is supposed to change you. (If it doesn't, maybe you're headed for "Depart from Me, for I never knew you".) It's supposed to change you to love people, even your enemies. It's supposed to change you to not love the things of this world - money and power. You're supposed to live that out.
So, yes, to first order, Christianity is very much not about money or politics. It's about you and God. But to second order, it's about everything. It's about caring for the widow and the orphan and the alien. It's about not ripping other people off, but instead giving to meet the needs of people around you. It's about loving people, even if they're not in your church or of your race or your political persuasion. It's everything you do, and how and why you do it.
> Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
There's this piece of product-management wisdom that I've been thinking about lately, which is that users almost always understand their problems better than you do. If the metrics say things are going well, and your users say everything sucks, your metrics are probably wrong. But the complement to that is that users mostly suck at solutions: you understand the constraints and difficulties of your product better than they do, so they tend to suggest things that are infeasible, overly specific, or prohibitively difficult to build.
When the public gives (or random bloggers give) give a damn about economics, it's a sign the economy isn't working. Of course they don't have useful solutions - they're not economists - but that feels a little beside the point: you don't have to be a plumber to recognize that your house is full of sewage. And since no one can be an expert in everything, life demands the ability to identify and call attention to problems you cannot personally solve.
An article like this is the equivalent of your roommate going "oh, damn, the living room is full of sewage, we better do something about that!" Of course you'll vigorously agree at first, because you're talking about the problem (which is clear to everyone). But then your roommate suggests fixing it by dropping dynamite down the drain - i.e., talking about the solution - and you're a lot more likely to disagree.
If the person at the top can come down for a coffee with people who endured some bad management, and ask honest, non-loaded three questions, it can be measured qualitatively but with very high accuracy.
The three questions are:
- What should we start doing?
- What should we continue doing?
- What should we stop doing?
This is an immensely powerful tool. Thanks to the awesome person who introduced me this.
Addenda: "Theory X" is something really bad. If you're working with a team which responds positively to Theory X, you have much bigger problems IMHO.
Every summer, my community pool has a cardboard regatta. Kids can use as much duct tape as they want to waterproof a cardboard box and paddle it 25 yards to the other side. Half of the vessels sink within a length or two and the kids have to swim to the edge of the pool. There’s no age limit, and last year a grown man entered a fully engineered catamaran design that beat all the others handily. The secret was using way more duct tape than anybody else.
AI dev tools are that catamaran. They’ll get you across the pool; you might even get half a mile from shore, but there you are, in the middle of the lake, sitting on cardboard and duct tape, wishing you knew how to swim.
I like to refer to this as "the hardest problem in computer science."
Several times over my ten-year career I've spent months building a thing to what we thought were the specs, only to have to throw most of it away because the specs change at the last minute, or somebody learned the hard way that details like are you paying for access to the thing, or access to the group the thing is in can actually matter a whole lot when you're building software. I would say I nearly always spend more time defining the problem than solving it.
"I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.
“But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.
“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.
“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.
No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).
When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
